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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.
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.
Usually, a terrestrial phone doesn't need to do anything much to "look" for a tower, besides keeping its receiver turned on. Towers emit beacons, and if you don't hear the beacon, there's no point in you sending anything - you won't receive a reply because you don't even hear the tower's beacon.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
"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.
When a phone has signal, the back channel includes information about neighboring cells. So, it knows where to look for the next back channel. Only a few frequencies to tune to. The problem starts when contact is lost. Phones use power looking for a signal. Re-tuning the receiver is not free.
They continuously tune over a series of frequencies looking for one. And keep cycling through them.
This bitter cycle of finding nothing uses up a phones battery very quickly. Before smart phones it was the single largest power user.
This is an OLD problem. It was well known in the industry in 1990.
I started writing software for cell phone companies in 1990. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how cell phones work. Moved on to a different industry in 2000. Some things don't change. At least not quickly.