Thursday, January 10, 2008


Anybody that spends anytime with me knows that I change phones with the same regularity most people change socks. Since some of the work I do is around mobile device security I at any given time have between 2-4 active cellular number on my person or in my bag. A phone will average about 6 2-3 months as my primary communication device before I get bored and switch it with a newer, shiner model. I just switched from the ATT Tilt (otherwise known as the HTC Kaiser) back to a Blackberry Curve 8310. Now I want to note this was not my first HTC phone and I find them to be well designed, functional, and generally good vehicles for Windows Mobile.

The Tilt suffered from a major flaw with its lack of battery life. The battery sucking blame seemed to fall squarely on the head of the 3G radio. I found a ton of stuff on the web about tools that can force it into EDGE mode to save battery. This is a good solution but then I end up with an expensive phone with nifty features I cannot use because of battery drain. The Microsoft Direct Push email is pretty good but all in all I missed my Blackberry so I switched back.

2 comments:

KiltBear said...

Apple iPhone user here. It is interesting to read about your 3G radio experience. I am curious as to what nifty features became unusable with being forced into Edge mode. (Actually I am more interested in what the 3G gave you when it was running.)

I've read (and watched on YouTube) that the 3G didn't gain folks browsing the web much advantage because cell data networks have too much latency. Latency ends up being the over-riding percentage of the total delay in waiting for a page to load.

Can you shed light on this topic from personal experience? Did you do any tests for web browsing on Edge -vs- 3G? Doing the test on an identical device might help eliminate another variable, as the tests I saw were a 3G phone -vs- an iPhone.

Thanks,
AJ

Robert Graham said...

Anybody that spends anytime with me knows that I change phones with the same regularity most people change socks.

yea, about once a month