Hi All,
yesterday I was typing a message to Dankees again, but after I push submit I lost the message... So, next day, new chances for where I live...
I will get you in to some more theory why and how batteries drain and phones get hot.
Did you ever ask yourself why a mobile phone must be switched off during flight in an airplane? Well, simply because your will not find a cell to register on and during its searches is creates a lot of distortion on the airplanes' equipment.
It doesn't have nothing to do with the fact that you are inside an airplane, but more to do with the fact that operators place antenna's facing to the street and not upwards to the airplane. Fact is that above 3000 feet you will not find any cell...
That is why airplanes use satellite phones. (or have their own cell on board on which your phone registers and you can make calls over their satellite transmitters)
If you walk the street of downtown Manhattan with all of his high buildings, you probably handover to another cell at every corner of the street. Again this drains more power than staying in one place.
A phone is a computer and when it comes to it, has the same nasty effects as the ones on your desk. Software can be bad coded, software can interfere with another piece of software. As you can read in this iPhone article it shows that this guy was having lots of settings back to default after he installed a new gadget...
Let me tell you something about software from the past. This happened 20 years ago and is still happening today...
I was asked by a company to analize a problem on a network of two locations using MS postoffice software. The company (a telecom operator) had huge Compaq servers installed on both ends and was having a huge IT department which took care of both sides of this telecom research department.
The company who installed MS Postoffice was held responsible for the fact that the installed MS Postoffice system didn't work. The effect was that the postoffice mail distribution system had the mail flag up to send a new message to the other side, but in fact the message itself was not in the outgoing box...
After careful examination of one side, I discovered that according to MS taskmanager the processor was clocking at 100 percent. Looking a bit deeper, you could see that other processes were in a queue.
I discussed that with the IT guys and they looked into Compaq insight manager and came back with the information that this application saw the processor was loaded for 7 percent.
After that a whole discussion started about which application was right; MS own internal program or the add-on software from Compaq? It took me 5 hours meeting with 15 IT managers to kill processes one-by-one to see when MS taskmanager processor load dropped down...
So we did that during daytime and after we dropped several processes without result, we dropped the Compaq insight manager and the processor went down. Right after that hundreds of email were delivered on both sides...
So we started the processes again in the same reverse manner and we found out that two processes were responsible for the 100 percent load on the server; Compaq insight manager and a backup process... Two pieces of software from different manufacturers were conducting a battle for processor time...
After that the guys checked the server on the other side and found out that the software version of Compaq insight manager was different from the one they had locally...
Checking bug reports, we found out that the local version had a nasty bug when it came to interfacing with the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) which in fact is a core processor task.
Conclusion: bad software can influence processor load (free translated as drain your battery)
I can tell you loads of stories regarding hardware influence also. I will give you a short one...
A guy one asked me to find an answer on a problem on recently delivered computers to a large company. He delivered hundreds right after they did a 3 months test with a demo computer. A software application crashed on those computers, but not on the demo model...
I checked the hardware and although both motherboards looked the same, I found out that a simple hardware revision on one of the chips on board (in this case the Memory Manager) was different.
The problem was caused by a 1/4 square inch chip where the text had to be read with a magnifying glass otherwise nobody would see it...
On bug reports was clear that the OS needed to be upgraded to the next version. This in fact gave them new problems, because the software they were running to interface with a mainframe computer had to be recompiled also...
Conclusion: revisions on chips can cause lots of problems also.
So hardware usually is not the same and software can have a nasty habit of interfering with eachother...
So now we have 3 possible answers on draining battery and hot phones:
a. problems with 4G/LTE networks;
b. problems of OS with specific chipsets;
c. problems of software (apps) which interfere with eachother.
Problem a can be eliminated by moving to an area where there is no 4G/LTE like what I accidently saw when I moved from Washington and Orlando to Cocoa Beach where there is only 3G available.
Problem b is going to be more difficult than before in the old days. The chips now are so small that you are unable to check revisions. But there is a solution to that which I will address later in point 5...
Problem c can be eliminated by wiping the device clean. That doesn't mean deleting the apps, because that still can leave some updated versions of core components. No, in this case your OS has to be replaced with the original. That means reflashing the core with the original software it came with...
My advice is:
1. keep a backup of the original OS version right after you bought it and the phone was still working like how it should.
2. Don't install too much apps. You will end up in an internal battle for processor time whether you like it or not. Software ALWAYS have bugs in it.
3. Ask yourself why that app is free. How do they earn money? Maybe this application gathers your surf behaviour and sends it to someone who sells that information...
Look at your PC. There is a big chance that if I would be able to analyze your traffic, I will find applications which sets up secure tunnels to a server on internet which analizes your surf behaviour. When you visit a page where adds are having a place, in most cases you see things you have recently visited. Bing bar does these kind of things...
This means traffic without a use. Traffic means power drain. Power drain in phones means hot battery...
They call it target marketing and it eats up data. Useless data for you, usefull data for someone else. You pay for each bit sent!
4. When it comes to software, nice to have doesn't qualify, need to have does. Don't experiment and decide to throw the useless piece of software away later. It will leave some pieces behind which can effect your other software.
5. Buy 2 exactly the same phones from the same series. On one you install apps and check if it influences your phone behaviour. When it doesn't, you can install it on the other phone also.
On the moment an app or an update for your phone starts creating problems, you still can fall back to the previous version on the other phone.
It looks expensive to do, but ask yourself how much cost useless data traffic in the long run? Can you buy a backup phone with it? I can assure you can...
Your data traffic will rise every day. It will not go down. Operators know this. They have to install new cells all the time since each cell can handle a number of customers.
Installing new cells is a question of CAPEX and OPEX. Data traffic for the end user will get more expensive. Operators find smart solutions by offering you bundles to avoid customer dissattisfaction.
Not so long ago data traffic was a fair usage policy. Basically no limits. Now worldwide we have to buy bundles...
Long message with lots of history. I hope it will help you out there to think before you do...
Fred
