Why do Verizon phones have inferior battery life?

[Ravynmagi]

Good timing, LaptopMag just did a test on this.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/tmobile-phones-longer-battery-life

Apparently T-Mobile had the best battery life in every test. Sometimes pretty big differences. The results among the other three carriers were mixed with Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T leading on different phones.

They were not sure why T-Mobile did so much better. The speculated it could be the bands they use are more efficient or maybe because T-Mobile has fewer LTE customers. But one idea I liked is that T-Mobile has less bloatware too.

 

[openwheel]

maybe T-Mobile phones have less bloatware?

 

[paperwastage]

Or T-Mobile needs more towers per area because of their higher LTE frequency bands, which means a T-Mobile tower would likely be closer to you than an att tower (and require less power to transit/receive)

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Good timing, LaptopMag just did a test on this.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/tmobile-phones-longer-battery-life

Apparently T-Mobile had the best battery life in every test. Sometimes pretty big differences. The results among the other three carriers were mixed with Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T leading on different phones.

They were not sure why T-Mobile did so much better. The speculated it could be the bands they use are more efficient or maybe because T-Mobile has fewer LTE customers. But one idea I liked is that T-Mobile has less bloatware too.

This is an interesting study. It also begs the question that how do the phones do on Wifi? Because if you compare all 4 carrier phones on wifi, you can normalize for bloat or whatever. Then only the difference between the wifi and cellular results can be attributed to differences in the cellular networks.

If I were to take a stab, at it, I would guess its because T-Mobile's LTE is very new and blazing fast. Race to idle is critical, so even if you get hung up for a few seconds trying to establish a connection for a page refresh (multiply that by once every minute), it gets big.

 

[vi edit]

That study has so many outliers in it that it's hard to make any assumptions other than T-Mobile is pretty awesome if you live in an area that they cover well.

What I found interesting is the damn near doubling in battery life that AT&T, Sprint and Verizon see going from the S4 --> S5 and the M7 --> M8 while T-Mobile sees quite a bit less.

Pretty crazy how much of a real world battery life bump you see in the current gen devices.

 

[soccerballtux]

True.

Razr M has a small battery. It's an oddity from a sea of half-baked android phones that Verizon offers. For some reason, the battery management in Razr M is outstanding even compared to Galaxy S3 which has the same SoC.

I looked into the Razr M because they sold it as 4.3" screen. I picked it up...hm...looks smaller than 4.3 to me...placed next to other phones...this is definitely smaller...so I brought a ruler.
It's 4.1"

f*#&ers...

 

[soccerballtux]

I'll do errands and my phone will be below 15% after a couple of hours.

Juice Defender or a tasker (don't bother it's a PITA to write scripts) script will control the radio and keep it shut off for you except for a 1minute poll every 15, 30, 60minutes or whatever you want.

That should help a lot.

 

[soccerballtux]

Good timing, LaptopMag just did a test on this.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/tmobile-phones-longer-battery-life

Apparently T-Mobile had the best battery life in every test. Sometimes pretty big differences. The results among the other three carriers were mixed with Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T leading on different phones.

They were not sure why T-Mobile did so much better. The speculated it could be the bands they use are more efficient or maybe because T-Mobile has fewer LTE customers. But one idea I liked is that T-Mobile has less bloatware too.

possibly their decision to run 42mbit HSPA+ on the towers vs At&t's 21mbit. That could be paying off now that HSPA modems are so optimized

 

[npaladin-2000]

My own experience has been that my AT&T devices work harder to hold very weak connections, while T-Mobile will give up on them a little more easily. Given how much battery it takes to hold weak signal this may cause significant differences between carriers, since I assume each carrier requests the same general policy when it comes to signal handling on all of their devices.

 

[sze5003]

My HTC one with a custom Rom gets great battery life. About 6 hours of on screen time with heavy use. By the time I'm done work I'm about 20% from 6am.