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I believe a problem with the early 4G handsets was battery life. This may be a reason of the Android phones with big screens: they're big anyway because of the battery to support 4G so you might as well put a screen on it. Of course in the IT world time flies and things improve fast.
Somewhere I still have a Dell Axim X3i PocketPC. If you turn WiFi on you can almost see the battery run out of the room.
I don't think that increasing screen size to solve battery problems would work. The extra screen area eats up a lot of battery too...
Maybe at some point, manufacturers will start to put gigantic empty areas around the screen to this end though. After all, the obvious option of making thicker phones seems so unacceptable to them nowadays...
What people forget is that there is still no VoLTE with seamless downgrade available in phones(switching from packet 4G to switched 3G/2G).
Up until then I doubt that VoLTE will be used much. Mobile broadband is a better option, where all practical LTE deployments in EU have been to date.
I imagine the distinction is mostly logical on the handset level & not making much of a difference for the radio modem (work of which uses most power, I guess); relevant mostly for backbone-level (and there already are networks, among more recently deployed 3G ones, using an all-IP architecture on that level - at least some from Huawei, with the benefit of straightforward upgrade to LTE).
Either way, using a mobile phone with data-only SIM card doesn't seem to make a difference... (OK, so maybe the control/SMS channel is still active; but, it's active all the time, even when idle - and in that state, even the most advanced mobile phones can last quite a while, so I'd guess its share of battery use is marginal)





Member since:
2010-03-08
As for battery life, I believe that from a theoretical point of view, 4G chips should be able to eat up less battery than 3G chips when offering equivalent performance. That's because to qualify as "4G" under the requirements of the UIT, tech like LTE Advance is supposed to use an all-IP network, in which even voice and texts go through the data connection of the phone, unlike 3G tech which has to maintain two simultaneous cellular connexions, one for voice and texts and one for data.
Of course, this is again purely theoretical, and I am sure that current 4G phones will manage to waste even more power than 3G ones in spite of this. Besides, low nework coverage has never been a good thing for battery life.