Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

edge vs 3g surfing and battery life (myths and truths)

V

vegas-steven

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 14, 2007
200
0
I read in the batter guide thread the statement that heavy browsing using 3g is better on battery life than edge.
The theory was that you can view more pages with 3g than with edge and therefore it is more economical to use that mode.

I wanted to open this up to debate in it's own thread because I think there is more at play than just how fast the pages load.

This is especially important to a person such as myself seeing as most of the time all I do is surf while at work and have excellent edge and 3g coverage.

Wouldn't the 3g antenna alone being switched on and searching for a signal combined with the brwsing would drain the battery faster than edge surfing, wouldn't it?
 
I get like 3 hours of surfing with both 3G and EDGE. I see no difference at all. Then again, I still think the battery on my phone is still subpar.
 
I'm in agreence with you on that but with wifi I see it has better life as opposed to EDGE so I guess they use the same logic.
 
your forgetting leaving the iphone in 2g mode will prolong the battery life and you'll get a few days out of the iphone rather than the 1 day i get from 3g because it keeps switching between 2g/3g because i'm on a fringe area plus the buggy 2.0.2 firmware.
 
AHDuke99 said:
I get like 3 hours of surfing with both 3G and EDGE. I see no difference at all. Then again, I still think the battery on my phone is still subpar.
Click to expand...


How old/new is your battery? I am about exactly 2 weeks into my phone and in the last few days I have found my battery life has jumped considerably. Today I disabled location services and use them only when needed and so can't say if it is better.

I find an increase though. I can usemit until days end and get a good 5 hours almost all iPod and Internet and 3-4 hours standby fromit.
 
Normally I keep my iPhone on 3G now. I used to use EDGE a lot but it drops calls or doesn't connect and is pretty slow internet wise. Might as well use 3G if I'm paying for it! The battery only drained 25% today after a full day of music, internet surfing, and calls and SMS. Not bad.
 
vegas-steven said:
I read in the batter guide thread the statement that heavy browsing using 3g is better on battery life than edge.
The theory was that you can view more pages with 3g than with edge and therefore it is more economical to use that mode.
Click to expand...

Theoretically, you could argue that each configuration has the same number of "page views", just that one is faster.

I'd argue, however, that 3G eats the battery faster than EDGE, so EDGE would actually have a higher overall "page view" count.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)

I keep 3G off most of the time and try to do surfing on sites that are mobile friendly to keep page load times quick. I also use RSS for this reason.

My phone also feels hotter when using 3G, bit that may just be paranoia.

Kinda makes me fee like I did not need to wait for the 3G version of the iPhone since I rarely use that feature!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back