Battery consumption on 3G vs EDGE + Wifi?

[catgo]

How does battery consumption compare if you have a 4 bar 3G signal vs a strong edge signal + super strong wifi, i've been trying these combinations out in the past few days (my phone is 4 days old) and I think the latter peserves battery life and gives you the speed of wifi, it doesn't make much sense though, what are you experiences? Does 3G consume that much battery?

Thanks....

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

If your signal is good on 3G there is no difference. It's when it's hopping between 1 bar 3G and an edge signal it consumes the most!

 

[mnsportsgeek]

3g consumes more battery than wifi. Alot more.

 

[Xgm541]

On my blackberry 9700 I used to do EDGE + Wifi and get a substantial gain in battery life.

On my iphone I was not able to reproduce the results. 4 bars 3g vs 5 bar edge is not that big of a difference. From my results, the battery life gain of using edge + wifi (if any) were negligible.

EDIT : my claims are based on edge + wifi for push email service, not browsing/downloading. Yes if you are actively using your data, edge/wifi will be better.

 

[FSMBP]

3g consumes more battery than wifi. Alot more.

Uh, that's wrong. WiFi consumes more battery than 3G.

EDIT:

Woops. My bad. You're right!

 

[mnsportsgeek]

apple claims about 2 hours more usage surfing on wifi than on 3g. I think that is what they claim at least. Might have to have my memory refreshed.

 

[catgo]

Thanks for your input guys, I rarely browse on the phone, just use it for calls, 2 push email accounts and some apps. When you're away from a wifi hotspot, does the phone consume more battery beacause its constantly searching for one, or if your turn off the prompt for it to let you know when one is available is enough for it to stop looking for wifi?