From a battery perspective, should I use wifi? Most of the time i'm at home or at work where I have wifi. I also have good lte coverage at both. Speed aside, will I save battery by not using wifi or not?
You'll definitely save battery by using wifi when you can connect. I love the speeds over lte, but it is definitely a hog...
i also had boost of battery using WIFI
Using unlimited data plan makes me to consider using 4g, but I found that Wifi consumes much less battery.
Use wifi. The battery savings are huge.
yes i cant stress enough, wifi saves enormous amounts of battery so use it when ever possible. the difference is like night and day.
Compared to 3G
I've been leaving my wifi off since I have unlimited data and the 3G is pretty fast in my area, no 4G yet.
I've had pretty good battery life lately using only 3G, I'll have to do a few tests and see which one and I'm a fairly heavy user I'm approaching 4GB this month and none of that is tethering
3G or Wifi
Tested watching a streaming video of 22 mins
on 3G I lost 13%
on wifi I lost 8%
Wifi wins, of course standby is probably different, if 3G vs wifi loses this badly I'd have to imagine LTE vs Wifi is a slaughter battery wise
Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.
SteveDusa said:
Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
pretty much correct. at least on the gsm side, when i connect to wifi at home, i can no longer see if the phone is on 3G or EDGE. but it definitely switches back and forth to those networks, while staying on wifi, you just dont see the icon switching, but its definitely happening. i dont see why cdma and 1x would be any different.
if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt
EEdaesung said:
if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt
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Click to collapse
You are absolutly right! How come I never thought of that. Will do that when I get home tonight.
Thanks for the tip!
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
Better yet get juice defender and automate it . Its very good app. Right now it says I'm almost adding fifty percent on to my battery.
I seem to be bucking the trend here, but LTE is working better for me than wifi. I usually have a good signal, so that's part of it.
The other part is that my wifi may be eating more juice than normal because the TB and my router may not be playing nice together. Ever since I added the TB to the network, I've had to reboot the router every coupla days. Before the TB, it was solid weeks on end.
Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.
shovelheadhd said:
Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.
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Click to collapse
Oh yeah this is very important, set wifi sleep policy to never greatly increases battery life. Otherwise it switches back to 3g when screen goes off and drains way more battery. This is very important to set this otherwise you wont see the increase.
Is strongly recommend switching to cdma only if yore gonna use WiFi and plan on saving your battery. Otherwise what's the point. I personally don't even bother using WiFi just use LTE only mode. I'm getting better speeds than most WiFi connections using my LTE.
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
same problems here
Scrappy1 said:
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
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Click to collapse
I have the same problem. Have went through many sim cards and factory resets. After 5 phone I finally have one that holds the signal a little better and does not go into this "funky mode". With the previous 4 (white 32gig) verizon phone I would burn through a battery in 6 hours at work. It would start with a drop in signal strengh at around -93 or so. Nothing would fix it. I finally got a blue 32gig and it seems to hold the signal to around -99. I don't know if I got a better batch of phones. But it seems to help me get through a day at work.
Scrappy1 said:
Anyone else noticed this? In areas of med to low LTE signal (-109 dBm), there are times when something locks up inside the radio and Signal Strength under Status will never change again no matter where I move the phone. During this funky mode, the battery is dropping rapidly during idle... Maybe 10% per hour. Something is wrong. During this same time android battery history shows yellow medium signal and voice calls work fine. There is also no runaway process cpu ussage or awake time. The only thing wrong and drawing too much juice is radio. If I toggle airplane mode or toggle wifi off/on the problem is solved for a while. I have VRALF2 firmware.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's not normal. Where I work I get 3g primarily but also 4g in the front of the building.....in the far back I get 1x. I have had my phone totally drop data for a while (like the radio sleeps or something) but never had the radio stick between 4g and 3g. I also live right on the edge of a 4g/3g line and my dbm right now is 111 on 4g LTE......If this was normal I would have had the situation your having since my signal is basically identical to yours. I would return it or at the very least contact Samsung. I'm sure Samsung will tell you to send it in for repair.
I have very weak signal at my house also. S3 switches from LTE to 3G and 1X and sometimes loosing signal completely downstairs but upstairs usually I get solid LTE with around -99dBm and ~10Mbps transfers. During this network jumping my battery drains very fast also but I never had my radio constantly locked at one frequency or signal strength. And I can directly compare signal reception to my wife's Fascinate and S3 loses this competition badly. Fascinate never completely lost signal at our house and it rarely jumps to 1X.
I did a factory reset yesterday and so far so good... I''ll update as time goes on.
As far as signal strength goes in general,my wife's Droid Charge always pulls in a few more LTE dBm's than my GS3. Based on general public feedback, GS3 is below average on signal and radio issues. It's too bad because the rest of the phone is above average.
It's been 2 days after the factory reset and no problems with battery drain or radio lock up.
The only app that I could maybe try and blame is Elixir 2's create widget feature for signal strength. This always returned bogus values and may have embedded itself at an unholy level. Simply uninstalling elixir 2 didn't fix it.
If anyone still cares... I found my radio lockup and battery drain issues returned only after I reinstalled Better Battery Stats. I again removed it and will see if I stay good.
Anyone know of an app that will switch to GSM only while on WiFi but then back to LTE when no WiFi is connected?
The low LTE signal near my house is killing my battery. 60% gone in 7 hours with no use (overnight)
I already have a data restriction and app killer app but it's this crappy low LTE signal that's doing it.
Found an app called "4G Toggle" but still looking for automatic GSM LTE switching.
can anyone help me to get better 3g signal on galaxy y? , because this 3g network is too slow on my phone n consume battery drain very fast
I own an LTE through TMob. I don't do alot on it - I get text, email, use GPS when I run, A little bit on the phone but not alot. My battery life is erratic. Mostly its connected to trying to find a signal when I'm traveling outside coverage areas - at least I think so. When I do that my battery life drops about 10% every 15-20 mins. Anyone have any ideas on how to prevent it from constantly searching for a signal? Current I have to remember to switch it to airplane mode when I'm in the sticks then remember to turn it back on later.
Even on my phone I cut the GSM signal when I am in no coverage zone
Well I guess that's that. Thanks!