On the [Turn Left Now] Road Again

So it turns out that I need a car charger.  Not because I forget to charge or anything.  I can get the full day of battery through normal usage.  This includes listening to podcasts essentially the entire day and several text messages and phone calls (mostly from Tracy) throughout the day.  No, I need the car charger to make sure that I know where I'm going.  That's right, I turned on the GPS.

This weekend I had to drive to my brother-in-law's house to pick up his daughters for a birthday party.  I've driven there twice now but have a horrible memory, so I figured it was a good opportunity to try out the GPS turn-by-turn feature that they added with Android version 2.1.

The instructions that were given by the phone were pretty straight forward and it was very easy to hear and understand the voice.  I wasn't looking at the screen very much (for obvious reasons), but in the few glances that I gave it there was everything you'd expect on a GPS panel: Distance to go, next instruction, which way you're turning, a basic map, etc.

Here's the issue: In the 60 minute round trip, I burned through nearly half my battery.  I know that smart phones, with all of their features, are notorious for going through their battery quickly, but that's ridiculous.  I talked to the folks at the Verizon store and they weren't anticipating an expanded-capacity battery coming out any time soon.  I think people would snatch those up like hot-cakes.  I was also reading comments in a forum where a person was talking about the battery needing to get "broken in."  I was previously unaware that batteries were like a new pair of jeans, but it provides me with a little bit of hope.  As such, I've been unwilling to research if there's any actual truth behind it for fear of having those hopes dashed to the ground.  I'm strange that way.

The main two options for a car charger are the Verizon-sold one that has the permanently-attached cord or a DC adapter that simply has two USB ports on the end.  I would prefer going that route as it's substantially cheaper and would be able to be used with Tracy's phone as well.  The problem there, of course, is the concern that either the phone or the adapter wouldn't follow the USB protocol of asking the device how much power it needs before going to full power.  Basically, I really don't want my phone to explode.

But really, isn't that what we all want out of life?