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Battery and Signal Strength

B

barco13

Newbie
Just got my Nexus 4 last Friday. Really love this phone. I am trying to figure out what carrier to use and right now I have a prepaid T-Mobile SIM ($3 per day). I have been happy with the network so far. We took the phone to my wife's school earlier this evening to test it out. (I am firing Verizon and will port 3 numbers over to whatever I use so I want to make sure I can get signals where I need them).
By the time we got to the school, I had about 9% battery left. My wife had the Nexus 4 in the school, and I attempted calling it several times where it went to voicemail. My wife said it did not ring at all. I know with the T-Mobile prepaid card, I am not setup for roaming.
Is it possible the low battery had an affect on this test or is this an issue of a T-Mobile signal not penetrating the building? My next thought is to get an ATT Sim from StraightTalk. However, I would rather have T-Mobiles speed.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
T-Mobile is notorious for weak building penetration. It's drastic sometimes. You can have 0 bars inside, step out the door, and have full signal. How many bars was she getting inside? AT&T definitely has better coverage and building penetration, but the sacrifice as you mentioned is slower data speeds. Will you be relying on mobile data a lot or will you be around wifi most of the time? Do you travel or are you usually in the city with good coverage? There are a lot of variables. I'd say try out Straight Talk with AT&T and go with whatever gives you better results.
 
Suggestions:

1) $50 for 30-days of unlimited voice, data and text ... see my info at the left for the URL ... utilizes both AT&T and T-Mobile, iiuc. Haven't been in anything qualifying as a "big city" yet though, but am very happy with it here on the edge of a National Forest, sometimes tethering the wifi lan to it when I lose satellite Internet connection due to weather or snow accumulation on the parabolic dish and I'm too lazy to go out and sweep it off.

2) the quad-core Qualcomm processor in the Nexus 4 is a power-hog, much of which goes toward heat-generation. Juice Defender in "aggressive" mode has remarkably improved battery life for my N4.
 
There is more to building penetration than most people understand or care to realize.
People tend to leave off the remaining factors probably due to the complexity or because they repeat what is said on the interwebs.

Another thing to note is that the Nexus 4 has a better radio than several other phones I have here such as the Galaxy Nexus or the One S.

The reason for the perceived building penetration issue is a making of T-Mobile themselves.
They do not upgrade all sites to HSPA so you have far less density on AWS than on PCS.
That is the reason for penetration issues 90% of the time. They have the sites they just are not upgraded.

That said... it might help to know the area that your in and we can probably tell you which of the two GSM providers is best. That's an area dependent thing... T-Mobile is better in some areas and AT&T in others.
 
hstroph said:
Suggestions: 2) the quad-core Qualcomm processor in the Nexus 4 is a power-hog, much of which goes toward heat-generation. Juice Defender in "aggressive" mode has remarkably improved battery life for my N4.
Click to expand...
The quad-core CPU is actually a *power-saver*.

Juice Defender is a lousy app, highly overrated and typical of so-called 'battery savers' worthless or worse in all but certain special usage situations.

LoyalServant is correct about building penetration of signals.
 
Crashdamage said:
The quad-core CPU is actually a *power-saver*.
Click to expand...

One can't change the laws of physics with an opinion ... the excessive heat generated and commented upon heavily in these forums comes from the battery power. Any desktop multi-core CPU has substantial heat-sinks ... the Nexus 4 uses the glass back as its heat sink.

Juice Defender is a lousy app, highly overrated and typical of so-called 'battery savers' worthless or worse in all but certain special usage situations. ...
Click to expand...
Again, your opinion sir and respected as such. My Nexus 4 battery life has vastly improved since installing the app and running it in "aggressive" mode.
 
hstroph said:
One can't change the laws of physics with an opinion ... the excessive heat generated and commented upon heavily in these forums comes from the battery power.
Click to expand...

This phone can get rather hot while preforming CPU intensive tasks such as gaming, but that's not a fault of this processor or even this phone. ANY phone, especially one with 4 processors, is going to generate a lot of heat and burn through battery when the CPU is stressed. By claiming this processor is power efficient people are referring to when the CPU in in idle. It's very power efficient when not being stressed. Also, Juice Defender doesn't scale the CPU. That's the kernel and governor. Juice Defender saves battery by cutting the data connection and blocking apps from syncing. You can control this manually and I don't feel the need to have an app do it for me. Mileage with Juice Defender can vary. Some people swear by it and other people don't see a difference.

Now can we get back to the topic of the OP? I'll again recommend you try AT&T's network in your city and see if you prefer T-Mobile or AT&T. Since you're not under contract you can always switch between the two.
 
Thanks for all the info as this is my first run with a GSM phone. I noticed when I was in the center of Walmart, I had a suspect signal as well--not a huge deal there since I try to avoid that place most of the time. I plan on doing another test at my wife's school. We are in the Kansas City metro area--western Johnson County/Shawnee specifically. **Edit** I seem to get a strong 3G signal at home and where I work as well as the "H" showing some of the time--assuming this is HSPA? Not sure if it is HSPA+ or not** I need to make sure my wife can get a decent signal most of the time and make sure she has access to WiFi at least.
My love towards T-Mobile is that is appears I can get 1000 shared minutes with unlimited text, unlimited data (1st 2gb at high speed) for $80 per month plus a 12% discount on top of that. This is by using their Value Plan for family. Another advantage as I believe this includes roaming since it is not considered prepaid and includes night and weekend minutes.
Another newbie question.....What are the difference between Straight Talk and Net 10? When I go through the process on Net 10 it appears they will ship me an ATT sim card--I was hoping somehow it used both Tmobile and ATT with the same sim card. Judging by their coverage map, it looks like a larger coverage area than Straight Talk? Maybe it includes roaming areas? Straight Talk would be $5 cheaper than Net 10 it appears, but does not include any roaming? I'm almost leaning towards me getting Straight Talk with a "cut down" Tmobile Sim and getting my wife an ATT Sim (assuming that has better coverage in her school).
Again thanks for all the input. We can probably agree having the freedom to worry about what carrier to go with is a good thing.

Thanks!
 
thebryceee said:
What's the mAh output for the charger?
Click to expand...

"mAh" (milli-ampere hours) is a measure of battery storage capacity, and really makes no sense when referring to a charger.

The Nexus 4 has a 2100 mAh battery, meaning that it can store enough electrons to supply 2.1 amps of current for a period of 1 hour. The fact that the phone never uses 2.1 amps is why the battery lasts longer than an hour. It also means that the battery can deliver 1 mA for 2100 hours, so depending on what kind of work is being done, complete battery discharge will be somewhere in between those two extremes.

To answer your apparent question, the "travel adapter" charger (at least the U.S. version) supplies current to the battery at a maximum rate of 1.2 amperes at 5 volts. The USB cable plugged into a computer etc. will deliver electrons to the battery according to the capabilities of the source machine, but certainly less than the travel adapter.

Some 12V USB adapters such as http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-2-Port-Charger-Output-Black/dp/B00511PS3C/ advertise output of up to 2.1A implying that they could charge the battery in an hour or less, but I'm reluctant to strain the battery chemistry beyond the 1.2A charging rate when the damn thing isn't replaceable.

Then again, depending on the lifespan of the charger, it could conceivably have an infinite mAh output, given an equivalent input. ;) I'm currently shopping for a suitable small solar panel so I don't have to leave the beach lounge chair, since they bring the drinks to me ... yeah right.
 
I'm on Straight Talk (AT&T sim) I get Crazy good reception the battery generally lasts me from 7am to 10 pm moderate use. And yes, the phone can heat up pretty good
 
One of my chargers have an output of 800 mAh, my evo charger has an output of 1A, I'm wondering what the output is on the Nexus charger, says on the adapter module.
 
I probably should have paid attention to that.
I have been using the charger from an HTC phone from some years back.
It's a standard micro usb and it's plugged in where I can't quite get at it easy but I know it's a 1 amp output.

That might be why I think the phone is a little slower to charge.... oops.
 
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