hotspot use

[aweber1nj]

Has anyone used their D2 (or D2G) as a hotspot for any extended amount of time?

I'm going on a road-trip and can keep the phone plugged into a charger (because my first thought is that the battery will drain pretty fast), but wondering if anyone has experience with keeping it running as a hotspot for maybe a few hours at a time?

Thanks for any feedback (good or bad)!

-AJ

 

[barthawk]

Has anyone used their D2 (or D2G) as a hotspot for any extended amount of time?

I'm going on a road-trip and can keep the phone plugged into a charger (because my first thought is that the battery will drain pretty fast), but wondering if anyone has experience with keeping it running as a hotspot for maybe a few hours at a time?

Thanks for any feedback (good or bad)!

-AJ

I tried this at a conference. It takes a lot of juice. I had the Droid 2 plugged into a wall charger and the battery charge still went down, although slowly. It also could have doubled as a hot plate after a couple of hours.

 

[aweber1nj]

I tried this at a conference. It takes a lot of juice. I had the Droid 2 plugged into a wall charger and the battery charge still went down, although slowly. It also could have doubled as a hot plate after a couple of hours.

Yeah, I kind of thought maybe I could/should hack-on an old Zalman CPU fan with some thermal grease to the back. Makes it hard to put in your pocket though.

Appreciate the feedback.

-AJ

 

[meyer]

It's hard to believe that the battery goes down while it's a hotspot on the charger. Not saying your lying, just crazy it sucks that much juice while running like that.

 

[barthawk]

It's hard to believe that the battery goes down while it's a hotspot on the charger. Not saying your lying, just crazy it sucks that much juice while running like that.

Well if you look at how much power is required to run a standard Access Point unit it doesn't seem that crazy. The D2 isn't really optimized for that task so sucking more than 700 mA to run an AP it is not unreasonable.

I was using a third party charger, so it's possible that a better charger could have kept the system at full power. I haven't noticed that the charger I was using is noticeably slower in charging the unit compared to the charger that came with the D2, so I wouldn't hold out much hope on that.

It was a little scary how hot the D2 got as well. That can't be good in the long term for the phone. I'm liking the Zalman CPU cooler idea that AJ suggested. Maybe we can have one that's easily detachable (although the thermal grease might get a little messy when it goes back in the pocket)

 

[jdbower]

Make sure you use a good charger as well, try for one with at least 1000mA (1A) output. A lot of car chargers (including my Verizon charger) are a tad underpowered and my X in GPS mode still drains the battery.

 

[aweber1nj]

I'm just going to rest my coffee cup on it so my coffee stays warm.

Come on, Gorilla Glass!!