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MadGoat

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 30, 2007
1,179
130
Canada
I'm reading all these threads about battery life being low and fingers being pointed at Push.

No correct me if i'm wrong and kindly explain it to me if I am way off, but...

Isn't the idea of push technology supposed to save battery life and shouldn't your phone be essentially in stand-by mode(much the same as when you're waiting for a phone call) until such a time that your phone recieves a "call"(for lack of a better term) from the push servers saying "hey I got a message for you. Take it".

If that's the case, couldn't we just throw out the notion that Push is causing battery drains?

When I have my phone near my speakers, I hear nothing until a push comes throuhg, then I hear a GSM/G3 buzz in my speakers. Otherwise it's always very quiet.
 
iPhone push uses IMAP IDLE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE

http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/imap-idle.html

The phone keeps a TCP connection open to the IMAP server, and waits for an update. If mail is received, a notification is immediately sent across this TCP connection to the client. The phone will send a packet every so often to keep the TCP connection open, and avoid a server/routing timeout.

So yes, Push is more efficient than polling for mail every X minutes, but it's less efficient than manually checking your mail.
 
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