Airplane mode = remarkable battery save

[Rouxenator]

Often you will hear people complain that their smartphone's battery does not last them a whole day. Now this greatly depends on your usage patterns so it is difficult to generalise. However recently I made a rather interesting discovery on an endurance ride across the Karoo. While most people had their fancy Garmin units go flat after 10~12 hours I stuck with using my phone (20 month old Moto G3 with 2,470mAh battery). I had the phone fully charged and switched on Airplane mode which disabled all radio transmissions from the phone (Wifi, Bluetooth, Cellular). Not really a problem since there was no cell coverage anyway.

Throughout the 12 hours I only woke up the phone 6 times to check that it was still recording and took 3 pictures. To my surprise it only used 34% of the battery over the entire trip. I think if I had on Wifi and Cellular it would not make it so far.

 

[bboy]

Cellular is always a killer, I used to set my phone to use 2g only and save tons of battery.
Once the tower I was connecting to was not working properly even though I connected to it, no calls data or anything worked, drained my phone from 100% to 0 in about two hours by just having a dodgy cell tower :/

 

[Dairyfarmer]

I've had a fully charger phone go completely flat in 6 hours trying to get a cell signal.

 

[Rouxenator]

That would have been the case in this scenario as there was no coverage along the entire route. Still remarkable to think it recorded the latitude, longitude and altitude every second for 12 hours and only used so little power.

 

[Cray]

Learned this trick in Kruger, battery gets chowed trying to get signal between caps.