SithLord0498
New Member
That is a great analogy, and the biggest hurdle here is that Verizon's system requires you to be connected to their data network in order to receive MMS messages. If they could find some way to allow those messages to come through on Wi-Fi, a good number of people could switch off their data connection more often and save on battery power.
I posted these screenshots on another Droid forum to give an overview on my phone's performance after going through a few ICS power cycles. This is, I believe, the 3rd charging cycle after installing ICS, and I have the official Motorola extended battery in my Bionic.
View attachment 57950
As you can see, I got 57 hours out of the phone, which is on par with previous performance on OS 2.3. And there was still 10% power left (although that final 10% seems to drop off very sharply!)
To get a clearer picture, I tend to keep it on Airplane Mode from 5-7 in the morning (the time I'm sleeping between my newspaper delivery job and when I wake up for my day job) and then again from 8:30a - 12p because the classroom I work in has walls that significantly muffles cellular and wi-fi signals. 4G is kept turned off unless I actively need it or I'm out shopping and *might* need it. When at home, I keep it connected to my home wi-fi with the phone set to stay connected even when the screen is powered down. 45 minutes of voice calls is actually above the usual average for me in a power cycle, and probably half of that was via Bluetooth through my car's sound system (phone was kept in my pocket, NOT on the charger). These changes are all done manually as I have disabled Smart Actions.
My current cycle, though, burned through battery life much faster and was down to roughly 25-30% after only 16-18 hours, and the only significant difference in my usage was...yep, using the 4G more! I streamed music over 4G via TuneIN radio for about 30 minutes, and it knocked out almost 10% of my battery. On Gingerbread, it would take about 1.5 hours to use up the same battery life.
So after letting ICS soak in and keeping tabs on my phone's stats, I can confidently say that, at least for my Bionic, the ICS update's biggest weakness is that it burns up more battery power than GB when it comes to being on the 4G LTE network.
Hopefully, that is an area where future phones will fare better.
