No 3G on the iPhone, but why? A Battery Life Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 13, 2007 3:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
The Real Shocker: Impact of 3G on Talk Time
The impact of WCDMA vs. EDGE on talk time battery life is important, because while simply talking you get absolutely no benefit from faster download rates while power consumption increases. There is one side benefit from being on a 3G connection vs. EDGE - you can receive phone calls while maintaining a data transfer, which simply isn't possible on either of these two devices over EDGE.
The Samsung Blackjack, by default, will attempt to connect to a WCDMA network first. If no UMTS networks are available, only then will it default to EDGE, and likewise if no EDGE networks are available then it will fall back to regular GSM. You can change the behavior of the Blackjack, especially when it comes to how to prioritize the various networks, but ideally the user would never have to bother with any of that.
The iPhone doesn't really have an option here, the voice connection took place over AT&T's EDGE network.
The most shocking results come from the Blackjack and the impact of leaving 3G enabled on talk time: battery life is cut in half. The 52% reduction in talk time takes the Blackjack from lasting almost 9 hours to slightly over 4 hours. If the iPhone would be impacted similarly, a 3G version of the current phone would result in less than 3 hours of talk time.
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jellinek - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Does the h.264 implementation on the iphone vs. the likely flash-based version on the blackjack impact this at all?Quicktime playback over the web (trailers set to loop?) might be a better way to determine EDGE/3G/WiFi battery life.
MrJim - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Anyone know if they will add MMS-messengering in iphone?GlassHouse69 - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
fuck iphone.that's all I have to say.
stop reviewing it. it is lemming equipment that is overpriced and hobbled with a beautiful screen. feels like 5-6 years ago Mac intellect at use. get great graphical images, get stuck in the mud hardware, hobble it all somehow, charge 1000 dollars more than you need and bam, lemmings jump. wee!
DavenJ - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
I guess this guy isn't going to buy an iPhone.Shark Tek - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Yeah I bet that he can't buy it.puffpio - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Is there a way to get this higher quality youtube feed for computers?? I'm tired of their pixelated crap.dacramer - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Who cares how LONG the battery lasts when loading web pages. The real test is how many web pages the battery can load per charge. Even if the battery lasts half as long over 3g, it surely must load more web pages. Is it more than double? 3g may not be so bad with regards to battery life with this taken into consideration.Icehawk - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
I think the exact same thing - the more important metric is how many pages you can load not how long the battery lasts with constant clicking.Araemo - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
"The biggest impact of all is, surprisingly enough, talk time; with 3G enabled, the Blackjack's talk time is cut in half, with absolutely no benefit realized from the higher bandwidth standard."Do you want to know why 3G is the default for talk time as well as data transfers? 3G has more bandwidth per cell tower, and talk over 3G uses the same total bandwidth as talk over GSM.. but since 3G increases the available bandwidth, you use less of the cell company's resources if you're talking using 3G instead of GSM. So battery life be damned, AT&T wants to make more money. ;)
cosmotic - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Your graph on the talk time page shows the iphone using wifi. Shouldn't that be edge?