Mugen Desire S Extended Battery Review

Being steadfastly used to the seemingly infinite battery of a BlackBerry, recently switching to an Android Desire S came as a bit of a shock; out of the box I was only getting about 8 hours of use from a full charge. A familiar story for a lot of people I'm sure... After some (well, a couple of weeks) of tweaking I managed to reliably get about 36 hours out of the phone but it still meant I had to charge the phone every day to be sure I would not get a flat battery at an important time.

I decided it was about time we decided to review one of the Mugen extended batteries I had read about.

I spoke to our good friends at MobileFun and requested the Mugen Power 1800mAh battery for the Desire S. The following day (they are exceptional at swift delivery) it arrived in the post, and it was quickly popped out of the packaging. The first thing I noticed was that Mugen recommend the battery be fully charged for at least 12 hours before first use. It is then recommended the battery is allowed to drain fully before recharging again. This should be repeated for the first few uses. At first we thought this was baloney, but on investigating further it's actually to allow the handset to reset it's battery level sensor for the higher capacity battery.

On first charge re-charge (after the initial 12 hour charge), it seemed to take a very long time for the phone to tell me the battery was full. Subsequent charges however seem to be much quicker (about 90 minutes compared to nearly three hours at first). This is actually normal condition, as it is just the phone performing an overcharge for a new battery.

After a few full cycles, we decided it was time to test the battery usage times comparing it to a Desire S with a stock battery.

Both phones were reset with new email accounts and twitter feeds, both were set to identical update times. They were as closely as possible *identical* to each other with just the batteries being different.

Performing identical tasks on each, the first thing we noticed was with the Mugen phone, the battery remained at 100% for just over 6 hours where the stock battery had dropped one notch after just four hours.

Three hours later, rather quite high load (both phones streaming music through Spotify over a WiFi connection) the stock phone had dropped to 50% where the Mugen was still at 80%.

The next test was a couple of hours of gaming, (I love my job!) leaving the stock battery at 12% while the Mugen was at 45%.

Finally we set up the video cameras to record HD video, and after just fifteen more minutes the stock battery gave up the ghost and the phone died, The Mugen phone still had 30% of its battery left, almost exactly what we would expect, considering the extra capacity.

Both phones were subsequently recharged for a standby test.

Under really light use, with no WiFi or GPRS and notifications set to hourly, the stock battery managed a respectable 38 hours before the phone went into emergency mode, the Mugen however lasted a very usable 52 hours before entering emergency mode!

To summarise then, the Mugen is about 30% better under heavy load and about 45% better under light load; impressive figures indeed, and considering the somewhat low price of the battery I'm surprised HTC don't fit these as standard.

I can't recommend Mugen batteries highly enough, especially if like me you're constantly frustrated by the poor battery life of your Android device.

Features:
Capacity - 1800 mAh
Exceeds all OEM batteries.
Lithium Ion technology.
1 year warranty.

Why Buy?
Extended battery to ensure that you have to worry about your battery less.
Between 30% and 45% More power than the original battery.
You can still keep the stock battery as a spare for extended trips.
Made with Mugen power cells.
No battery memory effect.

Why Not Buy?
If you're happy with daily charging.
If you are a very low use owner.