VZW DRM battery life on GSM

[rjglenn]

I will be traveling to a GSM country (Haiti) tomorrow and will not have access to electricity to charge my phone. Can anyone report on how well an ICS razr maxx does battery wise in GSM mode, no data, just voice and text. If nobody knows, I'll report back sometime next week...

 

[carracerz14]

So there cell signal but no electricity to charge your phone. Strange.

 

[rjglenn]

Haiti is a different place. Most homes do not have electricity, and those that do only have it for few hours a day. All the cell sites have generators and battery backup for the times each day when the electricity is somewhere else.

 

[euph_22]

If you're worried about the phone dying, I'd pick up an external backup battery, or a solar charger.

 

[ballroomdru]

I am curious about this as well.

 

[B360155]

I just received an Incredicharge I-8800 portable charger in the mail yesterday from Amazon. I previously purchased the Anker Astro 5600 mAh battery charger but didn't feel it had anywhere close to the advertised 5600 mAh capacity. I returned it for a refund and purchased this one instead whiich has 8800 mAh capacity and is $4 cheaper. It's a little bit bigger than the Anker one, but still fairly compact and it does seem to have a lot more charging capacity.

 

[rjglenn]

Well I'm sorry to say I can't really report on this after all. Verizon never provisioned my phone for international service, so my phone would not work at all - this was after two calls before leaving, one while there and the one after getting back.

I could "see" the GSM networks, but I could not connect to them, I would get a little orange triangle with an exclamation mark in the notification bar with the note the the device could not connect to the 2G network. This really caused me some problems because we were not able to do some things we wanted to do because we couldn't call ahead.

I'll be going back in a little while so I'll just try it again then.

 

[carracerz14]

Couldn't you have just bought a prepaid gms sim card?

 

[rjglenn]

Probably, had I known ahead of time it wasn't going to work. We were 90 km north of Port-Au-Prince, which is a good 3 -4 hours by car. Once I was were I was going, there wasn't anywhere close by to buy anything, much less a sim card that would fit a DRM. So I did without, and did fine without.

 

[narayanan9190]

if you are using 4g and you are going to a place that has 3g connection, then the battery will only stand strong....in my place, there is 2g and 3g ...in 2g i get around 24 hours (not kidding - data, around 2 hours of songs and around half an hour text and like 20 mins calls), but in 3g it will come only around 15 hours, but net speed will be very high (apparently!)

 

[Lars]

Gsm generally uses less power than cdma; all other things being equal.