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T-Mobile Smartphones Outlast Competitors' Identical Models
An anonymous reader writes Laptop Mag battery tested the leading phones on all four major U.S. carriers and found that the same models on T-Mobile typically last 1 to 3 hours longer on a charge. This trend is not new, but has continued for over 3 years of testing.
The article says While we don’t know for certain why T-Mobile phones last longer on a charge, there are some strong possibilities. T-Mobile’s network could be more efficient at sending and receiving data because of the bands it uses, or maybe there are far fewer customers on its LTE network, easing the strain. Another possibility is that T-Mobile tends to pre-load less bloatware on its flagship devices relative to the other carriers.
AT&T is firmly in second place in the battery life findings presented, with Verizon and Sprint jockeying for last of the four carriers measured. It woud be interesting to see a similar test battery for phones in marginal reception areas; searching for service seems to deplete my battery faster than talking does.
I thought a phone was using maximum RF power when it was looking for a tower to talk to?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My bet - different CDRX settings, fast dormancy, idle timers. Is probably a better engineered network.
The iPhone would actually be a more effective test because iPhones tend to be identical regardless of what carrier you are on. I'm extremely surprised they did not test the iPhone for this reason.
It would be interesting to know if an unlocked AT&T phone moved to T-mobile's network suddenly lasts longer.
And this is with t-mobiles software installed. With a clean phone, the T-mobile "my account" software is the highest usage bit of software on the phone. Disabling it was worth hours of runtime.
You would have to be crazy to be sane in this world. -Nero
Ok, so I did an anecdotal apples-to-oranges comparison between different phones on different networks and noticed that my phone was different, so that means that the apples-to-apples comparison the researchers did must be wrong, even though they explicitly controlled for that factor.
I think this is what you said. Let me know if I mistranslated.
They were at 41% for the three-month period ending in May. Two factors to keep in mind here: this research pertains specifically to US carriers, so it makes sense to look specifically at US market share, and we're specifically looking at smartphones, not the general cellular market. Globally, Apple's market share is significantly lower than in the US, even more so once you factor in non-smartphones, so I don't doubt that 15% is probably accurate somewhere for some set of conditions, but it isn't applicable in this particular case. 41% is the applicable number in this case.
iPhones tend to be identical regardless of what carrier you are on.
Not really. There are nearly as many differences with iPhones as there are with any Android phone that's on multiple carriers, and that's been the case from the start. For instance, when they did their first release for Verizon back in 2011, they incorporated a different antenna design than they had in the AT&T model, partially to deal with the antennagate issue and partially because of Verizon's use of CDMA. You could tell by just looking at the exterior which network someone's iPhone 4 belonged to, since the "gaps" were in different places around the casing.
And the situation really hasn't changed much. They still sell separate CDMA and GSM models in the US and out of the US, with different frequency bands being active depending on your locale and network. Wikipedia lists seven different versions for the iPhone 5s alone, 2 CDMA and 5 GSM.
They may eventually unify all of those with a single, future design, I suppose, but that hasn't happened yet.
It could also be that 15% refers to sales marketshare (i.e., new users) instead of subscriber marketshare (i.e., existing userbase). It's completely conceivable that maybe 41% of smartphones being used by people today are iPhones, but 15% of new phones sold are iPhones. (If that were the case, it would imply that lots of people were trading in their iPhones for Androids.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"fangirl" because calling someone a "girl" is so much more insulting.
As an Apple user, you really should try to think different next time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
iPhones tend to be identical regardless of what carrier you are on.
Not really. There are nearly as many differences with iPhones as there are with any Android phone that's on multiple carriers,
That's true for hardware differences. Software differences skew this gap far wider. An AT&T iPhone's software is far more similar to a Verizon iPhone's software than a similar comparison for Androids.
This is not really related to T-Mobile, but I do know that the battery life on my wife's HTC Vivid **DOUBLED** when I installed CM11 on it.
It used to last 7-8 hours and now she can comfortably go all day and not have to carry a power pack around with her everywhere she goes.
You are incorrect. I am posting from a "Verizon" iPhone which I bought, unlocked , from an Apple store, then popped in a T-Mobile SIM. It works fine.* The Verizon iPhone has all CDMA and GSM frequencies for all three networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon).
I bought the Verizon version so that I could use it in Korea. T-Mobile provides free data there but you have to have a CDMA-capable phone. Also, I was new to T-Mobile and if their coverage sucked I liked the ability to move to either AT&T or Verizon.
* T-Mobile recognizes it as an "unknown smart phone" since it doesn't broadcast the correct model number. I get full LTE speed data, voice, text, with graceful downgrades to 4G, 3G, and E, but I can't use iPhone specific features like visual voice mail.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Different versions of the same model phone use different radio chips.
I just bought my wife an S4 Mini, with a choice of at least 5 different models that only really differ in the radio chip - I9190, I9192, I9195T, I9195L and I9197.
They're all S4 Mini's, one without LTE or NFC, one with dual SIM, the others are all LTE with different frequency bands.