Battery drain when not on WiFi

[scgf]

On wifi my battery life is very respectable, but when I am out of reach of my wifi and out and about using mobile data my battery drains much faster. I have noticed this more when I am an area which has pockets of 4G but mostly 3G. Does the G3 use battery more in this scenario? Is it polling constantly for a 4G connection? Should I turn 4G off? It's not really worth trying to use it when a 4G signal is so patchy.

Maybe it's something else?

Comments welcome!

 

[SpookDroid]

Can you post a screenshot of your battery report? I'm guessing your coverage when out and about isn't very good, and yes, that can deplete your battery so much faster.

If your signal is low, the phone uses more energy to try and reach the cell tower for both sending and receiving data. Think of it as someone you're talking to. If there's no noise and you're in front of each other, you have no trouble hearing things and you speak in a normal voice. But if you are suddenly in the middle of a noisy room and 50 away, you now strain to hear what's being said and have to yell to make yourself heard, straining your vocal chords. Same thing with phones. The worse the signal is, the harder they need to try to decode the data being received and the more energy they need to put out to reach the tower to make their sent data come across.

With modern phones it's not so much now, but 4G in bad coverage did use to be more battery-hungry than 3G with bad coverage.

 

[scgf]

Thanks. I've since rebooted and enabled ART, will post a screenshot the next time after I suffer a big battery drain.