Battery life on 8320 with WiFi
 

Has anyone else noticed considerable drain in battery life with WiFi connected? I mean, I always knew that battery life would go down a notch with WiFi, but this fast?

I've only been playing with WiFi for over 2 hours now and battery is already at 65% - NUTS!

Have you been using it sold for 2 hours?

I have noticed that the battery does drain quickly, but it is my observation that voice (both UMA and EDGE) are the key driver here. WiFi certainly does take up juice. No question.

ive actually been pretty impressed with the battery life while on wifi though i havent done voice over wifi

I've been connected via uma since about 230 eastern. It's now 9 pm and I've eaten through about 1/3rd of the battery. I've been doing a lot of browsing, giving the camera the once over, and had a half hour phone conversation. That seems ok -- I think I'd be able to last a day on uma with a good amount of usage.

I notice my battery drains MUCH faster than my Pearl used to. Guess that's the price you pay for wi-fi access?

I still had 10% with non stop uma, browsing, and picture taking after 21 hours of giving the device the once over. Pretty pretty good, as Larry David would say.

You have to expect more battery useage if you have wifi on! The battery on the Cirve is not very big so it already has a shorter run-time than the 8800. adding Wifi only makes it worse. However, it should still last a few days using wifi for VOIP, right? My phone easily does so this Curve probably will manage to...I hope.

Alot people say this all the time. The point being is that if you sit there and play with your phone for hours eg backlight, making changes to fit your needs, using every feature to see if it works right, your battery will drain faster...... You cant compare brand new phone usage to normal every day usage. Most people dont even let the phone charge for a entire day to break the battery in.

Wifi is no different than cell coverage in the concept of how it has to work for signal; so you'll probably see varying results on people's battery consumption due to how strong/weak their router is as well as channel competition (which can cause packet competition and retries, hence more battery). Rearranging your infrastructure (move the GHz cordless phone away from the router, moving router to have better coverage, etc.) may provide some benefit.

If you're in a populated wifi area (right this second my laptop sees 11 networks, most of them on channel 6) change your channel to something other than 1, 6, or 11 (the usual out-of-the-box defaults for most routers) and choose 4 or 7 or something else. Reducing the work your device does to compete for signal should help keep the battery in better shape. You can also reduce your router encryption to WEP (instead of, say, WPA2) -- remember the more encryption you use the more CPU work the device has to do to encrypt/decrypt the packets. Less CPU work = less battery use. (*)

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(*) my caveat is that I don't really need encryption in my Wifi due to personal SSH usage and other linux things. I encrypt just to keep the honest people's noses out of my DSL bandwidth - if you run a Windows network (sic), decreasing your encryption may be a bad thing and put you at risk. proceed with caution.

Ditto TDawg. Two hours of solid constant use of any part of the BB would drain the battery well, even if you are only reading email, the backlight is pretty draining in that case.

I haven't notice yet but, since I use the wifi majority of the time at home, I can always plug it in and charge it :)

My WiFi has been on since Friday and it's now Sunday and I still have battery life. Goin on my 3rd day now on a single charge so I am quite content with the battery life even with WiFi being on 24/7.

exactly. My wifi and bluetooth and my service light was on for approx 11 hours, And my phone went down 5 percent. Lets not forget the emails and text i was getting. I actually have had great battery life. This is the best phone I ever had... A course i was a Nextel sub at one point in my life but this is the complete package.

Very pleased with WiFi battery useage. I am shocked how long it is lasting.