GSM better batterly life than CDMA?

I have been on sprint for some year and am considering cingular/att---there
is a dead hole around my house with sprint I cant stand. It seems like all
the phones on cingular have much better battery life than sprint. I have one
of those huge Sanyo speakerphones that has 7 hour talk time with an extended
battery---but I see that time on some of the small cingular phones?

Battery life is determined by the phone, not the carrier. FWIW, I
tried switching from digital to GSM on ATT and the battery life on the
phone was just awful! It was a Motorola V505 and I could barely get 1
hour of talk time and 2 days of standby out of it. But at least the
GSM coverage was also terrible! Nowhere near as good as digital here
in Colorado. Needless to say, I went back to my original digital
service and trusty Nokia.

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:32:03 -0800, Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>*Not* true. CDMA phones get much worse battery life than either GSM
>or TDMA. CDMA phones are more active and are doing more than the
>equivalent TDMA or GSM phones.

The most important factor is coverage. I have a 7135 on Verizon. With
a full signal, I can go 2-3 days with about an hour a day talk time.
However a job site I was at for a few weeks, the coverage in the
building was spotty. At 7 PM, the battery was almost dead.
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On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 14:29:21 -0800, Evan Platt
<evan@TheObvious.espphotography.com> wrote:

>On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:32:03 -0800, Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com>
>wrote:
>
>>*Not* true. CDMA phones get much worse battery life than either GSM
>>or TDMA. CDMA phones are more active and are doing more than the
>>equivalent TDMA or GSM phones.
>
>The most important factor is coverage. I have a 7135 on Verizon. With
>a full signal, I can go 2-3 days with about an hour a day talk time.
>However a job site I was at for a few weeks, the coverage in the
>building was spotty. At 7 PM, the battery was almost dead.

Usually, the reason for this is that when the phone loses a digital
signal it will drop back to analog and try to work there. Analog uses
battery charge at a much higher rate than CDMA digital. Most dual or
triple mode phones give you the option to use digital only which will
pretty much eliminate this problem. In a decent coverage area, CDMA
phones will use battery at a significantly lower rate than any other
technology.

Klein

Klein's 1st law: "if you haven't tested it, it doesn't work."

Wow,,,lots of different opinions on this one. I thought it would have been
cut and dry. I don't think I use Analog at all on my sprint as I stay in the
city. Of course I also know to take the manufacturers battery life with a
grain of salt.

Jeff Johnson" <me@me.com> wrote in message
news:c0DMd.8729$Ix.7942@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>I have been on sprint for some year and am considering cingular/att---there
>is a dead hole around my house with sprint I cant stand. It seems like all
>the phones on cingular have much better battery life than sprint. I have
>one of those huge Sanyo speakerphones that has 7 hour talk time with an
>extended battery---but I see that time on some of the small cingular
>phones?
>

On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 15:39:23 -0700, Klein <kleing@aol.com> wrote:

>Usually, the reason for this is that when the phone loses a digital
>signal it will drop back to analog and try to work there. Analog uses
>battery charge at a much higher rate than CDMA digital. Most dual or
>triple mode phones give you the option to use digital only which will
>pretty much eliminate this problem. In a decent coverage area, CDMA
>phones will use battery at a significantly lower rate than any other
>technology.

I had turned analog off.
--
To reply, remove TheObvious from my e-mail address.

>>>*Not* true. CDMA phones get much worse battery life than either GSM
>>>or TDMA. CDMA phones are more active and are doing more than the
>>>equivalent TDMA or GSM phones.
>>
>>The most important factor is coverage. I have a 7135 on Verizon. With
>>a full signal, I can go 2-3 days with about an hour a day talk time.
>>However a job site I was at for a few weeks, the coverage in the
>>building was spotty. At 7 PM, the battery was almost dead.
>
> More than likely your unit wasn't receiving signal and tried to get an
> analog signal. Analog signals will quickly drain the battery. Also
> CDMA even by itself has much poorer battery life than either TDMA or
> GSM if only because of the way that CDMA works.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I had once heard that CDMA requires more computing (or processing power)
than TDMA based technologies.

Not sure if it's true, but it would make sense because TDMA based
technologies always have a constant communication rate, where CDMA is
variable depending upon the amount of sound transmitted, the number of
phones connected to the cell, and other factors.

TH

Tropical Haven wrote:
> I had once heard that CDMA requires more computing (or processing power)
> than TDMA based technologies.

I haven't heard of CDMA phones last more than a couple of days on
standby, in contrast to GSM phones lasting weeks. The computation angle
makes sense: TDMA phones (such as GSM) just listen on a particular
frequency in a particular time slot. OTOH, CDMA phones are doing
incredibly complex signal processing to extract the "interesting" data
out of all the crud (from its perspective) on the 1.25 MHz carrier. This
includes for the periodic listening (every second or so) for a page for
an incoming call. CDMA-1xRTT is much better about this than the "old"
CDMA-One, but I don't know what realistic standby times are up to on
CDMA phones.