Source?
This runs contrary to that miserable chipset in the iPhone, but I've not seen anything definitive for the N1 on this subject.
Explanations I've heard are that 3G keeps contact with up to 6 towers where as EDGE picks one. How much of this is internet bull it unclear.
Google I/O 2009,
I don't regurgitate info without seeing its source and this one looked pretty good. Most people are under the misconception that 3G sucks battery faster than EDGE. You can see by the chart that 3G is less all around. It transfer data faster than EDGE so it's at full less. Same goes with WiFi. A lot of people look at spare parts and the *#*#4636#*#* with battery info and see that "since unplugged" WiFi is at near 100% so they immediately think that they must turn this off because its killing my battery. The question is what is that 95% of, 5,10,15% of total battery drainage, and where was the battery at to start with. A lot is going on that we need to take into consideration. The better screen in the menu is Partial Wake, this tells you what apps are continuously running, Android System,Google, Google Voice if you use it, calendar and what ever is required to all the time from the system. This app permission is "prevent phone from sleeping", there is much to discuss about that permission but in short it depending on what the app requires it can turn on and prevent it from sleeping all the time, some time or for a short time after the app goes to the background. Many variables. You can achieve a slight increase or in some cases ,increase by a decent percentage of your battery life, 15-20% by using a task killer. But that task killer has to always run also to monitor everything which seems counter productive to me. It also takes CPU usage kill of an App, which to me is also counter productive as you are running the CPU at a higher speed when normally it would be running at a much lower speed. It takes just as much cpu usage to hold a app in the background doing nothing, using no CPU just taking space so if you do need it it readialy avalible. think of it as a Parking lot. If you go to the end of the parking lot to get a car to work on you bring it back to the shop, now you need to go get another car to work on but you might need to work on the first car later or soon, so you park it close to the shop. Its not taking up space for what you are doing at the moment neither is it distracting you from what you are currently doing. Now if you need that space for another car you can park car #1 in the back of the lot. Now, the spaces are just like memory, it take just as much of your attention(CPU usage) to have that space open or with a car in it. Android does this very well for you. if you need memory for another app to run it will kill the back ground app of until enough memory is available to run it. No need for a task killer right. Look at your permissions and see whats running all the time, see what has permission to keep the system awake. Then you can start to narrow down whats causing your battery drain. I really dont want to say the names of certain apps because they are great apps and I have emailed the developers of the ones i found already to see if they choose to change in an update. Widgets, news feeds, constant RSS updates things of this nature pull juice, that's a no brainier. How, when, and how much is different for all apps and widgets and it's up to you to figure your system out. I have used Set CPU before and it is a great program and does save some battery because it prevents the CPU going above (or below) at set speed. Some times this may seem counter productive as well but i dont think it's too much. I get from 6am to 11:30pm each day with heavy usage. At 11:30 its around 15-10% I didn't used to until i started digging into the way it all works. When i first received my nexus it was 7-8 hours max. I have changed nothing other than understanding they way the system works and sort out the issues. I even bought a spare battery because of the battery life and it was a major issue for me. It was one of the reasons that i never could get my iPhone to be a daily workhorse. I hope this helps, i know it was a long read but there is a lot of info.
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