Airave and EVDO phones

I disabled EVDO on my phone this morning. Over the weekend my phone was dead after 12 hours of minimal use at home.

I read an online review of the Airave when it was used with an Instinct, and they reported the same thing...that their standby time with no use went from 1 week pre-Airave to 2 days with the Airave installed. They suspect it is because the phone still prefers EVDO for data sessions, and therefore will bounce back and forth between 1X and EVDO all day long.

I noticed this first hand...when I use EVDO at home I will have 0-2 bars of signal and the EVDO indicator is on. If I lost the EVDO signal, I would go to full bars and 1X data arrows. In the past, the signal strength wouldn't change much between 1X and EVDO. Now it seems obvious that when I am on 1X I use the airave and when using EVDO data, it uses the towers.

So hopefully my battery drain will be fixed some. I will report in a couple days.

 

Back to Nextel!!

j/k

 

Well it has only been about a day, but I have used my phone much more today than I did yesterday and I still have all 3 bars on my battery indicator. By this time yesterday I was down to two bars, and by the time I got home at 6pm, I was down to one.

So far so good with EVDO disabled.

 

Correct. But if you have an EVDO device the phone will try to find an EVDO signal for use with data even if that means "dropping" the Airave signal during the data session. Only if it cannot find EVDO will the data go through the Airave at 1X speeds. I could watch my signal meter go from 1 bar and EVDO while loading a web page back to full service and 1X once the page had finished loading. Imagine the phone behaving this way all day...back and forth between a distant tower and the airave and you can see why battery life is not as good.

My battery life has probably doubled since I disabled EVDO on my VE20.

 

I don't care about the overall life of my battery, but I don't want it to go dead after 12 hours and 50 SMS and 20 minutes of talk.