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Comment by nullvoyd | Hacker News Reader

Glorious news this morning. Enabled it on my Nexus 4 with Telus and I can confirm that this works absolutely fine.

However, I'm quite curious about the battery life impact. So far the N4 isn't a champion in this category. Adding LTE..

LTE as implemented on current gen SOC's actually has improved battery life VS 3G. Its the first-gen multiple radio variants like the Thunderbolt which gave LTE a bad rep in that regard.

What's your claim of LTE offering better battery life VS 3G based on? The battery test that Anandtech designed for the iPhone5? I personally can't put much faith in this particular Anandtech battery test:

It doesn't jive with my personal experience using the iPhone5 on LTE and 3G

It contradicts Apple's own battery life claims

Devices with the old SOC get dramatically different results on the new test (see for example the results for the HTC OneX in Anand's initial review and compare with the results in the iPhone5 review chart).

The claim isn't that LTE has better battery life vs 3G. Instead it is:

LTE battery life with today's SoCs vs 3G on today's SoCs > LTE battery life with last year's SoCs vs 3G on last year's SoCs

with the suggestion is that the improvement is significant enough that LTE battery life isn't the problem it used to be. None of that claims that LTE battery life today is better than 3G battery life today.

IIRC this is still a problem if your carrier doesn't fully support LTE, i.e. you still need your 3G radio switched on to receive calls.

This is one reason I'm excited about the Google-Dish wireless carrier news. If they made a 4G-only carrier, you could use VoLTE for calls. By removing the need for non-4G chips, phones would become lighter, smaller, cheaper, and less hot when running. And hopefully service would be cheaper and more stable too.

Doesn't seem to make a noticeable impact on most recent VZ phones, and as far as I'm aware VZ doesn't run VoLTE[0] yet.

[0] Anecdotally, I'm hoping that's right. I've been on (GSM/UMTS) T-Mobile for years and switched to VZ a few months ago; and I've noticed a marked drop in call quality & stability vs. every GSM phone I've owned.

> However, I'm quite curious about the battery life impact. So far the N4 isn't a champion in this category. Adding LTE..

Just get a bigger battery. I got a 3900 mAh extended battery for my Verizon LTE Galaxy Nexus from Mugen Power[0]. Now my phone can run for 2.5 days without any problems. After a week, I didn't even notice the added thickness.

0: http://www.mugen-power-batteries.com/mugen-power-3900mah-ext...

The Nexus 4 has a sealed battery. Upgrading will be a bit tougher.

Wow, why is everyone jumping to copy Apple? I just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and the battery, RAM, and SSD are all non-removable. I had to pay a huge premium to increase the RAM to the maximum of 8 GB, whereas in the past I would've bought it with the minimum amount and then upgraded it myself with aftermarket RAM purchased from Newegg or Amazon at a discount. I left the storage at 128 GB, so I'm going to have to carry around an external HDD. It's a really ugly trend in the industry.

I think you just answered the question yourself.

The extra profit from pre-emptive upgrades is probably cancelled out by the increased cost of warranty repairs. Repairs get more complicated, more costly, and more consumers end up having their devices swapped out where previously individual parts could have been replaced.

I think it's more so a side-effect of the relentless push for smaller, thinner devices.

That aligns with the priorities of most consumers. The average consumer is not going to upgrade their hardware — at least, not themselves — but they do want a sleek, slim design.

I don't think the 1-yr warranty claim rate is a needle-moving issue. Quality isn't it that bad. And extended warranties more than pay for themselves. The upgrade price for RAM basically includes the cost of repair and some extra room.

>The extra profit from pre-emptive upgrades is probably cancelled out by the increased cost of warranty repairs.

This is exactly the calculation apple has done; they now deem RAM to be reliable enough to not have a significant impact on warranty claim expenses. This is why they did not solder the (much less mature tech) SSD.

>I think it's more so a side-effect of the relentless push for smaller, thinner devices.

I think this is naive, personally. The extra 3d space of a RAM module on a laptop is minute. The size is a nice bonus. Also i'd bet a very significant chunk of macbook Pro owners upgraded their RAM.

I would imagine it is legitimately cheaper to design and manufacturer the devices this way.

Personally wrt phones, I consider needing a third-party battery for normal use a failure on the manufacturer's part and buy something else.

(FWIW I use a Razr M, which also has a sealed battery. Remarkable little phone.)

It's sealed, but screws on the bottom make it easy to replace.

But not easily replace with a higher capacity battery, given how various elements of the antenna are built into the back surface.

Not the battery, the battery is glued on to the case with a good amount of adhesive which requires a lot of prying.

Source: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+4+Teardown/11781/2

The Nexus 4 and the iPhone 5 have similar battery life if you disable LTE on the iPhone. The faster you can finish loading your data, the sooner you can turn off the LTE chip and start saving power again.

Well this is just rubbish.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6440/google-nexus-4-review/2

The iPhone 5 has nearly DOUBLE the battery life of the Nexus 4 for typical usage. If you disable LTE it will be even better.

Doesn't that review affirm the core of danudey's statement?

> "As always we test across multiple air interfaces (3G, 4G LTE, WiFi), but due to the increased network load we actually find that on a given process technology we see an increase in battery life on faster network connections. The why is quite simple to understand: the faster a page is able to fully render, the quicker all components can drive down to their idle power states."

AnandTech's 3G benchmark scores for the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4 are 4.55 and 4.15, respectively. It's only when the iPhone 5 runs on 4G LTE that it scores 8.19.

And while I appreciate AnandTech's quantitative reports, I'm not sure you can call this "typical usage", unless you typically spend all day refreshing web pages.

No. THIS is rubbish. Did you even read the article you linked, or did you just scroll through the pretty pictures?

> typical usage

Are you serious? This pretty much affirms my point that you didn't read the article, unless you consider constantly refreshing web pages at a fixed interval with fixed brightness 'typical usage'.

> If you disable LTE it will be even better.

Apparently you didn't look too closely at the pictures, either. The article contains an entire paragraph (that I'm not going to repeat) that explains why LTE provides better battery life in this particular benchmark. In fact, if you look at the exact same chart you're referencing the iPhone 5 is at 4.55 with LTE disabled, a mere 0.40 more than the Nexus 4.

Your blatant Apple propaganda is getting pretty old.

Presumably, since the n4 has no a antenna for late, your reception is going to be bad, so it may end up pinging towers all day and killing your battery.

Did you just have to change the setting via ##4636##?

I'm with Bell Canada and not having LTE is a deal-breaker for me.

Someone on the XDA forums confirmed that it works with Bell, but if LTE is that important to you, I don't know if it's a good idea to rely on what is essentially a 'hack' unless Google decides to officially support it.

Yes. I simply followed the procedure as shown in the OP.

You also need a LTE compatible Micro SIM card. Most phones sold by the canadian carriers nowadays do have them, even if they are not 4G.

I just read somewhere that to condition the battery of a phone you should do the usual full discharge/charge cycle every once in a while but also try charging the device via a computer's USB port (the slow way) instead of using the wall plug adapter.

Yeah... you'll want to ignore some of that. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...

There really isn't any memory in them. There is value to slow charging, but even more important is temperature and avoiding keeping them near full charge for an extended period of time.

There isn't any "memory" in a lithium polymer battery's chemistry like was found in NiCd and early NiMh batteries, but on some devices, a full charge/discharge cycle functions to program a true digital memory in the battery management controller about the actual properties of the battery.

From the same source: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/battery_calibrati...

>There is value to slow charging

Only to a point. The provided charger tends to be well within this limit (no benefit to using USB).

Agreed. The real trick is to not keep the charge up at full.

Down voters please explain. He not reply so far is a link that substantiates the above advice. An Apple.com recommends a occasional full discharge, mainly to calibrate the percentage estimator.

There was a link making the rounds late last week about the "best" amperage to charge lithium ion batteries. Someone made the false remark that using a computers USB port to "slow charge" is better because it means you're staying under this value. However, that's not what the article said nor are wall changers actually above the stated value.

The better takeaway from the article is to keep Li batteries cooler than ~95F to extended their life.

There is also no need to condition Li batteries. Apple used to have you do a calibration step for new batteries, but that was to reset the circuitry that was used to estimate the charge left in a battery. The old replaceable batteries had this built into the battery (the little button you pushed to get the row of green lights.) In new MacBooks this is all factory calibrated.

It's generally a good idea to never take advice from someone who answers with "I just read somewhere..."

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