does wifi drain the battery if on all the time?

[lgbalfa]

i have read conflicting reports about leaving the wifi on all the time or off to save battery life.

anyone with direct experience to know if it even makes a difference?

thanks

 

[whoover]

i have read conflicting reports about leaving the wifi on all the time or off to save battery life.

anyone with direct experience to know if it even makes a difference?

thanks

I never turn it off. The phone is very efficient at only using the radio when it needs it. It typically uses about 8% of my battery (about the same as idle cell radio). The only large battery consumer is screen, and I keep my brightness all the way up. It uses wifi when you bring up GPS (to kickstart the location identification via its database of publically visible wifi networks) and you'll get a request to turn it on whenever you use GPS if you default it off. I find the small battery drain to be worth not having the hassle.

 

[PowrDroid]

i have read conflicting reports about leaving the wifi on all the time or off to save battery life.

anyone with direct experience to know if it even makes a difference?

thanks

Leaving WiFi on all the time will use battery. The question is--does it make a difference? I don't think so. I've got1 day, 9 hr., 54 min. on my last charge, WiFi has been on 100% of the time, and has used 15% of my battery, but I have 30% battery remaining.

So to make the numbers easy to work with, let's say I've got 33 hours of use on this charge and 33% battery remaining. With similar usage my phone should run out of battery at 49.25 hours. (I would not let it get that far discharged, I'd probably plug out in at hour 46.)

This means that WiFi has used 15% of 49.25 of those hours, or 7.4 hours. So if I never turned on WiFi I would get 56.6 hours of battery life, instead of "only" 49 hours.

I say leave it on all the time. Not worrying about battery management is one of the nice things of having the monster battery in the Maxx HD.

I leave Bluetooth and GPS on all the time as well.


Sent from my Razr Maxx HD

 

[jtc303]

I am a big wifi user...work..home I love it.. I used to have a smart action set to turn it off and on with the screen but I've actually seen slightly better battery life just leaving it on

|[JTC MaxxHD]|

 

[Eclipse2K]

Only if you're out of range as it will continue to look for a network. I wouldn't be concerned though as I usually leave it on myself along with Bluetooth so my car connects automatically.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note II