It is not difficult for careful users to find that in the evolution of smart phones from 2G3G4G networks, although there has been a qualitative leap in network speed (from KB/s to MB/s), the battery life has gradually declined. After entering the 5G era, this trend will be more obvious.
▎ Use scene variations
In simple terms, the impact of network upgrades on battery life is mainly reflected in the changes in usage scenarios and the loss of hardware modules themselves.
The game is the most expensive use scenario, let's first look at the changes in the use scenario:
In the era of 2G network, mobile phones are mainly used to call and text messages, and the power consumption of this application scenario is relatively low, and the battery life is natural and durable;
At the beginning of the 3G era, the popularity of social software such as online reading e-books, online data checking, QQ WeChat, etc., will accelerate the consumption of batteries;
After entering the 4G era, online video and mobile games have become big power consumers, and they can consume all the power in a few hours;
When 5G arrives, extreme network speeds and lower latency, mobile phones can handle more tasks at the same time, and this is one of the reasons why 5G mobile phones are more expensive.
▎ Wear and tear from hardware
Every network upgrade requires the phone to simultaneously replace the antenna, RF and baseband chip. Taking the upcoming 5G mobile phones as an example, they need to use Massive MIMO (large-scale multiple entry and multiple output) technology, with at least 8 antennas built-in, the power of the RF module is higher, and the Kirin 980/Snapdragon 855 platform wants to use 5G and also needs to use the design of the external baseband chip, which will significantly increase power consumption and affect the endurance time.
▎ Influence of signal strength
Limited by the coverage of the operator's base station and the occlusion of the environment such as buildings, there is a situation of signal instability in any kind of network. In order to ensure the stability of the mobile phone signal, the system will automatically switch to the data network mode with a better signal in this case. The problem is that the signal itself is strong and weak search, switching are power consumption, and this is why we are in an environment with a bad signal (such as an elevator), and the mobile phone power drops faster.
To alleviate the power consumption problem of the signal:
As consumers, we cannot decide on the carrier's base station signal and the built-in baseband and antenna design of the mobile phone, and can only reduce the power consumption related to the network signal as much as possible from the system setting level. For example, many mobile phone systems support wi-fi and 4G signal linkage, such as Huawei/Honor's main "Link Turbo" and OPPO mobile phone feature "dual-channel network acceleration" function, which can make the two networks superimpope when gaming and high-quality online video, although it can improve network speed but also bring additional power consumption.
Also, if you're not afraid of disconnecting incoming calls during gameplay (important!). ), you can turn off the "VoLTE HD Calling" function in the SIM card settings.
If the 4G signal in your environment is very good or particularly bad, you can enter the code on the dialing interface (each brand of mobile phone is different, please search on the Internet according to the brand) into the engineering mode, set the preferred network type to only 4G or only 2G/3G state, leave this area and then manually change to automatic mode, which can reduce the power consumption problem of frequent search networks to a certain extent.
By the way, if your phone doesn't have a SIM card installed, you'll find that it's much longer-lasting than a SIM-installed phone. Similarly, a mobile phone with 2 SIM cards is also more expensive than installing a single card.
(Source: Computer Enthusiasts)