The first thing you'll notice when you first get the HTC Thunderbolt 4G Smartphone from Verizon: your battery life sucks. It's blazing fast, can download apps in a blink of an eye (as long as you're a rather slow blinker), it can connect your laptop (through PDAnet) at lightning fast speeds (probably why they called it the Thunderbolt) and watching videos doesn't require waiting for the buffering. That's the good news.
The bad news: if you tried doing the things I just mentioned just to check them out, you're battery is probably down to 50% (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but not much).
Some things you can do to to help increase your battery life:
1) Keep WiFi off. Turn it on when you need it.
2) Go into Accounts & Sync and turn off "Facebook for HTC sense". The phone comes pre-loaded with FriendStream, continually updates your social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter) and sucks non-stop battery juice. I prefer to have the regular Facebook app and open it when I want to check it.
3) Turn off animations. Go to Settings, Display and select "No window animations are shown." You won't notice the difference. Unless you just have to have an animated effect when you go from one screen to another.
4) And MOST IMPORTANTLY: Turn off 4G.
What??? I just got a 4G phone and I have to turn it off. Yup. Unless you are always near a charger this is a must. Your phone will be in a constant state of searching for a 4G network which will drain your battery as much as when it finds one and uses it.
HTC neglected to make a simple toggle so that the user can easily switch from 4G to 3G, so here's the simplest way to do it:
• Open your Phone screen and key in *#*34636#*#*. You will immediately be taken to a hidden menu called: Testing. Click on the first link called "Phone information," scroll down to the drop down menu which displays: "CDMA + LTE/EvDo auto" and switch that to "CDMA auto (PRL)." And that's it. You are now back to 3G. When you need to switch back to 4G, simply repeat the process and select the 4G option.
I heard that HTC is going to add a toggle in the first update, and there may be some third-party apps out there, but this method is quick and pretty simple.
After shutting off 4G, my battery life improved to the point that I was accustomed to with my 3G Droid.
Here's a brief video showing you how simple it is: