Eollie
Well-known member
My terminology is off. I am referring to idle as the phone in standby nothing but the occasional email push or weather update. My statement stands 3g would be better than wifi in this state of the phone.This probably has more to do with slow downloads than the actual radio. 3g is much slower than wifi. Given equal time running, wifi will use more power, but instead downloads faster then idles down saving power. In idle mode wifi uses less than 3g while active.
When both radios are in the same state, 3g is more energy efficient.
In the CM7 setting there is the ability to put the 2g/3g widget in the notifications bar, but if you do its greyed out like it wont work. Atleast for me it is. So I guess I should have said with CM7 roms for our phone it is limited by the rom. And yes I remember the whole debate regarding it.Actually you can, at least on Froyo, it was an old trick to increase battery life before custom roms became mainstream.
Before anyone goes running off to find an app that does it (yes, they exist), keep in mind, that I have no idea how they will work with CM7, but even more worrisome is that many (including myself) have found them to cause network drops. Sometimes to the point of needed to restart the phone or re-activate the phone. Many argued this for weeks, however I could make mine drop the connection repeatedly as could a few others.
IMO if you are going to install apps and scripts to limit how much battery is used to the point of making the phone dumb, why not just get a dumb phone? Pick up another battery or a extend battery. I use one app and with my useage it works fine. No special settings just the out of box settings. I do see people running scripts and using multiple apps just to get another 2 hours of battery. But in the end all they are doing is making the phone dumb. Increase the time between checking for emails, and updating the weather apps, rss readers and such. Most apps have a manual update/refresh if you are needing to check for something right then. Otherwise every 30-60 minutes is plenty of time. Plus it will give you more battery.