Database Users

Batterylife, 3G vs. 4G

Okay, so WiFi is usually better than 3G when it comes to battery life; but what about WiMax? I don't have a stable signal yet so I can't reliably test the two. What are ya'll experiences (for those within a reliable 4G area)? Better, the same, worse, or a lot worse?

Award Tour said:
Okay, so WiFi is usually better than 3G when it comes to battery life; but what about WiMax? I don't have a stable signal yet so I can't reliably test the two. What are ya'll experiences (for those within a reliable 4G area)? Better, the same, worse, or a lot worse?
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I don't have reliable 4G in my area, but I notice that even turning on the wimax 4G radio dramatically drains my battery. Don't know if its becasue its constantly searching for signal or just becasue the radio is turned on. My 2 cents, but I know it's not very thorough..

Any time you have a radio turned on and do not have a signal it will drain the battery trying to find a signal.
If you go to an area with poor 3g service, your battery will drain crazy.
They are testing 4g in my area, so it is up and down a lot, so I cannot test.
From reading other posts, I believe 4g may take slightly more battery.

Since Froyo has been released, the 4G battery drain isn't nearly as bad as it was on 2.1. I've noticed that the speeds have substantially increased as well as better battery management as well.

infamousjax said:
Since Froyo has been released, the 4G battery drain isn't nearly as bad as it was on 2.1. I've noticed that the speeds have substantially increased as well as better battery management as well.
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Yeah, that's why I wanted to see how things are now. We all know how 4G got slammed by reviewers for killing the battery, but the new radio might have changed that. I'm just curious at how it compares to 3G now under ideal conditions (good signal).

I have full 4G coverage where I live and to be honest when 4G is on, the battery drainage difference is not much, when compared to 3G.

I have 4G in my area as well, but I leave it off because it goes back and forth from being connected to not being connected. I did notice last night that my battery went from 70% to 5% over night... Anyone know what could cause that?

pscalett said:
I have 4G in my area as well, but I leave it off because it goes back and forth from being connected to not being connected. I did notice last night that my battery went from 70% to 5% over night... Anyone know what could cause that?
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I have the same problem. I'm in the Baltimore area and the 3G/4G switches back and forth. I figured out that when the phone isn't in 4G, it searches for a 4G connection, but you can put it to 3G only (with an app called Phone Info) until Verizon is done with their 4G coverage.

4G uses more power than 3g, which uses more power than wifi.
4g<3g<wifi.

it's significantly worse on 4G, so much so that I have an extended battery and I still don't use it.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA Premium App

AvatarOfFrost said:
I have full 4G coverage where I live and to be honest when 4G is on, the battery drainage difference is not much, when compared to 3G.
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there is something wrong with your phone then, maybe it's not sleeping. you should be noticing a huge difference.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA Premium App

3G Drain on Jelly Bean

Are we likely to see a fix for this? We know there is a problem with 3G drinking battery but how likely are we to see a fix. Solutions like disable 3G aren't viable for a lot of people, so I just wondered what peoples thoughts on this were.

Try changing your modem. You should see a slight improvement in battery life, nothing major but still better than nothing.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

Yeah a modem did help but I still had a big problem. Are we likely to see a fix, I remember this being a problem with ICS which is why I reverted back.

Its not the modem. My phone stock uses the XXKG3 modem, and i have been using that on ICS and now into JB. Jellybean definitely has worse battery concerning 3G / H for some reason. I just barely squeeze a day out of mine.

Yeah, I was struggling to get even a day. I tried almost all of the Jelly Bean ROMs and they all suffered from the same problem. I really wanted to stick with JB, especially C-ROM because it was like a dream to use but on a good day I'd get about 7 or 8 hours maybe? I would always have to plug it in twice a day. Currently trying SauROM which is better but I'm starting to think that the best for battery life is genuinely a stock rom like JVS.

skezza said:
Yeah, I was struggling to get even a day. I tried almost all of the Jelly Bean ROMs and they all suffered from the same problem. I really wanted to stick with JB, especially C-ROM because it was like a dream to use but on a good day I'd get about 7 or 8 hours maybe? I would always have to plug it in twice a day. Currently trying SauROM which is better but I'm starting to think that the best for battery life is genuinely a stock rom like JVS.
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with any rom I've got a day and 6 hours depends on usage

On Jelly Bean?

did you limited your speed to 3g or do you also use hsdpa? if you use hsdpa, give 3g a try i think the battery drain in 3g is a lot lower ... in my opinion if you are not downloading 3g is fast enough to browse or youtube.
for just instant messaging you can give 2g a try

2G isn't really usable on Three mobile.
I don't know how to limit to just 3G. But yes I normally use HSPDA. That said, we should be able to use it without draining our battery

I'm not getting any major battery drain here. I can last a full day on HSDPA and or WiFi.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium

Really?

skezza said:
Really?
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Yup
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium

if you will buy a strong battery 1800-1900 mAh, you will see the different

Yeah, that's the alternative. Bigger battery I guess.

skezza said:
2G isn't really usable on Three mobile.
I don't know how to limit to just 3G. But yes I normally use HSPDA. That said, we should be able to use it without draining our battery
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You CAN limit to just 3G. You have to go to Advanced Settings or Galaxy S Settings (depends on a ROM) and go to HSDPA and put it to UMTS mode only. It'll switch it to 3G and will consume less battery
Sent from my GT-I9000

Helloworld294 said:
You CAN limit to just 3G. You have to go to Advanced Settings or Galaxy S Settings (depends on a ROM) and go to HSDPA and put it to UMTS mode only. It'll switch it to 3G and will consume less battery
Sent from my GT-I9000
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in my opinion, thats the point, go to settings/advanced/RADIO in your case hsdpa + hsupa should be ticket, simply tick umts an you should notice, the changing radio icon in the status bar (no longer h, but 3g).
your 3g and hspa power consumption depends really strong from the signal strenght and in your phone is connected constantly or changes often. bad reception causes a large waist of battery power.

My guess is you have Google Now / Maps running in background which always uses your data.

darristan said:
My guess is you have Google Now / Maps running in background which always uses your data.
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On slim 2.9, I found that removing G now, and turning off all location tracking increased battery life. Now I can get a day and about an hour/90mins of screen on time with data/wifi only on when using it. I suppose after more than 2 years of use on the one battery charging every day or more, there's only so much one can expect from a device and battery.

But isn't it recognized that this is a problem? The 3G Bug? Nothing to do with Google Now etc

theskymoves said:
Now I can get a day and about an hour/90mins of screen on time with data/wifi only on when using it. I suppose after more than 2 years of use on the one battery charging every day or more, there's only so much one can expect from a device and battery.
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in my opinion thats not enough, do you mean 24 hours or 16 hours? could be a little more with 90 mins of screen time, but you shouldnt need more.
inverted apps can by the way help too, avoid white and light colours as background

How can I make my n4 on T-Mobile always stay on hspa +?

Its constantly switching from edge to hspa when it switches to h I have two bars then goes to edge I wanna force it to stay on h and stick how can I do that?
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

You on 4.2.1 or 4.2.2?
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda premium

You cant force it to stay on hspa+ all the time. Same thing applies to a WiFi signal. You can't force a WiFi device to stay connected to WiFi all the time when you're out of range. When you are out of range you will lose the signal and it will try to reconnect.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

twolfekc said:
You on 4.2.1 or 4.2.2?
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda premium
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4.2.2
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

scream4cheese said:
You cant force it to stay on hspa+ all the time. Same thing applies to a WiFi signal. You can't force a WiFi device to stay connected to WiFi all the time when you're out of range. When you are out of range you will lose the signal and it will try to reconnect.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2
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I did this on my gs2 it had an option WC DMA only that's what I'm looking for here.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

You can change WCDMA preferred to WCDMA only in the *#*#4636#*#* menu... It doesn't mean signal will magically reach your phone though, it could just be the the N4 isn't as good at picking up a weak-ish 3g signal as your old device. I can't imagine they will have set it up to band-hop unless the signal on wcdma is somewhat marginal.

Azurael said:
You can change WCDMA preferred to WCDMA only in the *#*#4636#*#* menu... It doesn't mean signal will magically reach your phone though, it could just be the the N4 isn't as good at picking up a weak-ish 3g signal as your old device. I can't imagine they will have set it up to band-hop unless the signal on wcdma is somewhat marginal.
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I know I won't magically get signal I know I have signal it just keeps switching even tho I have signal in h. I thought it switches when it gets really weak I get really good speeds with two bars I don't consider that weak.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

horr1blek1tten said:
I know I won't magically get signal I know I have signal it just keeps switching even tho I have signal in h. I thought it switches when it gets really weak I get really good speeds with two bars I don't consider that weak.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2
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It switches in response to demand from the device. If your phone is idle or at the very least not using network intensive applications it will ramp the radio down to 3G/Edge. Once your phone detects that you're running applications that demand more network allocation it will adjust appropriately to HSPA+. This is a feature not a bug and if your phone was always using it's HSPA+ capabilities then your battery wouldn't last half a day. I don't even think you can force enable HSPA+ always on anyway, I may be wrong though. If you get it though remember to carry your charger with you.

ian577416 said:
It switches in response to demand from the device. If your phone is idle or at the very least not using network intensive applications it will ramp the radio down to 3G/Edge. Once your phone detects that you're running applications that demand more network allocation it will adjust appropriately to HSPA+. This is a feature not a bug and if your phone was always using it's HSPA+ capabilities then your battery wouldn't last half a day. I don't even think you can force enable HSPA+ always on anyway, I may be wrong though.
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I might have misunderstood your post a bit, but EDGE does not run on 3G. EDGE works on 2G networks. HS(D/U)PA(+) works on 3G networks. The phone should try to hold on to a 3G (WCDMA, whether that be using HSPA or not) network in preference to a 2G (GSM, whether using EDGE or not) network as long as a strong enough signal is available. Although it was not worded as such, I think the OP was enquiring as to why the phone was dropping to 2G when 3G signal is available, not concerned by whether that 3G signal was HSPA or not and asking if it was possible to switch to 3G only, and I explained how to do that. No modern smartphone automatically drops from 3G/HSPA to 2G/EDGE to save battery, I don't think modern modems draw that much more power when talking to a 3G network. The device will automatically fall back to 'normal' 3G data to save power when the data connection is not in use, but that's a different matter.

Proccess that chewing up battery

just FYI qosmgr is chewing up your battery, if you are rooted and have root explorer (or equivalent) go into system/bin and look for qosmgr and rename it to qosmgr.bak...and if you want to to turn off mpdecision you can look for that process too.
I notice it helps with battery when phone is idle and nothing breaks yet on my end.

Battery seemed fine no drain get a days use no problem. What is that gosmgr?

sc-uk-88 said:
Battery seemed fine no drain get a days use no problem. What is that gosmgr?
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depend on your usage, if you are on HSPA+ or 4G your battery will eat up more noticeable. QOSMGR is a quality of service manager, I believe it manage your network speed base on certain applications. renaming it to .bak has help me putting the phone into deep sleep a little bit quicker.

G1_enthusiast said:
depend on your usage, if you are on HSPA+ or 4G your battery will eat up more noticeable
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not true. whichever mode gives you the fastest download, and the quality of that connection is good, is usually the most battery friendly. as soon as i got lte in my area, i started using it. speeds were so fast that i started using only lte, even wifi i stopped using. using lte, i notice that i get over an hour more screen on time than using hspa+ or edge. edge gives me the worst battery life. this is both my nexus 4 and nexus 5.
imagine this, download a file 20mb in size. via lte it takes seconds, via 3G it minutes, via edge(2g) it takes an hour. via lte its very fast, so the phones arent wasting time and battery downloading it constantly. because of this, battery on lte will end up much better. plus, on top of that, any of the newer phones that have lte are now using a more efficient lte radio. on my nexus 5, i average 5-6.5 hours screen on time. same cpu, but thats a smaller battery than the g2.

simms22 said:
not true. whichever mode gives you the fastest download, and the quality of that connection is good, is usually the most battery friendly. as soon as i got lte in my area, i started using it. speeds were so fast that i started using only lte, even wifi i stopped using. using lte, i notice that i get over an hour more screen on time than using hspa+ or edge. edge gives me the worst battery life. this is both my nexus 4 and nexus 5.
imagine this, download a file 20mb in size. via lte it takes seconds, via 3G it minutes, via edge(2g) it takes an hour. via lte its very fast, so the phones arent wasting time and battery downloading it constantly. because of this, battery on lte will end up much better. plus, on top of that, any of the newer phones that have lte are now using a more efficient lte radio. on my nexus 5, i average 5-6.5 hours screen on time. same cpu, but thats a smaller battery than the g2.
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That partially true. When you are on LTE, sometime you are connecting to multiple towers therefore using more power. With WiFi you will only using one WiFi module therefore not taking up as much. Typically when you are connecting to WiFi you are using alot less than network connextion this has been true since the beginning of smartphone.

Qosmgr its Linux program to manage CPU governor. The qosmgr program takes as a parameter an xml file with the configuration of governor.
That xml file is in /system/etc/qosmgr_rules.xml.

so its not recommended then?

martindar said:
so its not recommended then?
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I'm curious about this as well. I've read on multiple forums for various phone models that adding .bak to qosmgr (as well as to gsiff_daemon) helps improve battery life if you're seeing Android System use up a lot of battery.

I don't know if you are referri g to just stock rooted lg roms or customs. I don't have that in system bin and running vanir. One thing I notice chewing on batt is google play services… specifically gcm. Until now I didn't know what it meant but it is google cloud messaging. I'm wondering if I can use android tuner to disable it and if its ok to do so? Anyone know?
Sent from my LG-D800 using Tapatalk 2

There are a decent amounts of gcm service checkboxes. Just not sure if/ what it will mess with if unchecked.
Sent from my LG-D800 using Tapatalk 2

gm007 said:
Qosmgr its Linux program to manage CPU governor. The qosmgr program takes as a parameter an xml file with the configuration of governor.
That xml file is in /system/etc/qosmgr_rules.xml.
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are you sure its not quality of service in 802.11e
regardless of what it is, I have not missed it, and it does help with my battery.

SIGNAL DROP FIX for Custom ROM by rocknegi

Those who are facing dropping signals, someone posted a fix in CarbonROM thread and its working very well! I'm getting MIUI stability and no call drops! Perhaps someone can implement it in Linage.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=72815014&postcount=162

That's a complete rom. Not a fix for custom rom.
Sent from my Redmi Note 3 using Tapatalk

this is the commit...
https://github.com/nitrogen-project...mmit/389bf97053547aec4c4f6dcc172649e2ea386672
Its a hoax
How it works:
There are bands associated with networks (aka band 40 for lte which give awesome speed but has lesser range)
The more the speed the lesser the range. So when the device receive less signal, ie the signal strength is low, the modem falls back to the next band which have more strength but less speed.
Using this the modem will stick to the current band, and in doing so the device will use more power to keep up with the low signal strength, aka less battery backup.
In simpler words, using this hack you will stick to the current band even though the signal is poor, but it will take more power, you will get less battery backup, and the actual signal strength wont change at all.It just prevents the modem from falling to a lesser band.
i will have to flash miui if i want to have awesome speed on lte. Custom roms are such a huge benefit but they do have some cons too.

adithyan25 said:
this is the commit...
https://github.com/nitrogen-project...mmit/389bf97053547aec4c4f6dcc172649e2ea386672
Its a hoax
How it works:
There are bands associated with networks (aka band 40 for lte which give awesome speed but has lesser range)
The more the speed the lesser the range. So when the device receive less signal, ie the signal strength is low, the modem falls back to the next band which have more strength but less speed.
Using this the modem will stick to the current band, and in doing so the device will use more power to keep up with the low signal strength, aka less battery backup.
In simpler words, using this hack you will stick to the current band even though the signal is poor, but it will take more power, you will get less battery backup, and the actual signal strength wont change at all.It just prevents the modem from falling to a lesser band.
i will have to flash miui if i want to have awesome speed on lte. Custom roms are such a huge benefit but they do have some cons too.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was thought modem consume more battery when there switch between bands.
Sent from my Redmi Note 3 using Tapatalk

amar2cool99 said:
I was thought modem consume more battery when there switch between bands.
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yep it does a little..but in this case its acyuallt avioding less signals....more or less it will consume some battery....

adithyan25 said:
this is the commit...
https://github.com/nitrogen-project...mmit/389bf97053547aec4c4f6dcc172649e2ea386672.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is there a guide on how to implement the commit to Roms like RR?

lee480 said:
Is there a guide on how to implement the commit to Roms like RR?
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implement it here
/telephony/java/android/telephony/SignalStrength.java

adithyan25 said:
implement it here
/telephony/java/android/telephony/SignalStrength.java
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is there a more detailed instruction?

lee480 said:
is there a more detailed instruction?
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you may ask rocknegi he will assist as he can explain it more that i can...i havent implemented it untill now...but im sure it is implemented in the above mentioned path.... he may know more of it as he had done once