How much of your unlimited mobile broadband are you actually using?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by robpegoraro

In one comments thread this week, I’ve had readers say it’s silly to hold out for unlimited mobile broadband when you can save so much every month by opting for a capped plan. In another, I’ve had readers comparing strategies to hang on to their Verizon unlimited accounts for as long as possible.

My hunch is that the first group has the wiser strategy. Consider the graph at right, charting my data usage from early March to early April: Even with all of SXSW and more than 900 megabytes’ worth of tethering, I still only racked up 2.13 gigabytes.

And that’s well above average, going by the latest numbers about North American usage from Alcatel-Lucent. That wireless-infrastructure vendor found that LTE users consumed an average of 46 MB a day–about 1.4 gigabytes a month–while 3G users ate up 17 megs a day, or only half a gig.

Am I missing something here? You tell me. Take a look at your own phone’s monthly data consumption and report back in the poll below. To check that detail in Android, open the Settings app and select “Data usage.” In iOS, open the Settings app, tap General, then tap Usage, then “Cellular Usage.” (Note that this isn’t broken down month by month, and that if you want to see which apps ate up the most data you’ll have to spring for a third-party app like DataMan Pro.)

For extra credit: Is that number more or less than you expected, and does it have you rethinking your choice of wireless plan?

About these ads

Your device can be too small and too thin (July 2012 CEA repost)

Posted on April 20, 2013 by robpegoraro

(Since a site redesign at the Consumer Electronics Association resulted in the posts I wrote for CEA’s Digital Dialogue blog vanishing, along with everything there older than last November, I’m reposting a few that I think still hold up. This one ran July 27, 2012; it’s on my mind again after two recent stays with relatives who had broadband Internet at home but no WiFi router connected to it.)

For well over a decade, I’ve had the same wish list for each new gadget: smaller, lighter and thinner than its predecessors. But lately, I wonder if I should be more careful about what I wish for.

I still appreciate carrying around devices that weigh less and take up less space than earlier models—preferably while running longer on a charge. But some recent devices I’ve tested or purchased suggest the costs of being too thin or too small.

Consider the connections around the edges of many new laptops, including the MacBook Air I just bought, but also many Intel-based Ultrabook PCs. The thinnest among them often leave out wired Ethernet ports and standard HDMI video outputs, requiring users to pack adapters.

That’s not a huge tradeoff for video. If you expect to plug a laptop into a monitor or an HDTV, you’re foolish not to bring your own cable, and one with a micro-HDMI plug at one end will take up less space than a full-sized equivalent. But with networking, you’ll need to bring an adapter supported by your operating system or trust that Wi-Fi will always work, no matter how many other people jam the airwaves near you.

And as just about anybody who’s gone to CES or any other tech conference can testify, that rarely happens. Veterans of these events know to look for Ethernet, and some companies have taken note: Google won compliments for providing wired Internet access in the press seats at its I/O conference last month.

The race to build the thinnest laptop, as opposed to the lightest, doesn’t make much sense from a usability perspective. An added eighth of an inch in thickness won’t make a laptop any more awkward to operate or carry. It’s not a thick phone that will break the line of a suit when tucked into a pocket.

Smartphones risk a different sort of miniaturization malfunction. Since the 1990s, phones using the GSM standard have used compact SIM (subscriber identity module) cards to store account data. This has made it easy to move a number from one phone to another and, with an unlocked phone, switch temporarily or permanently to a new carrier.

That’s given GSM a serious advantage over the competing CDMA standard, which doesn’t require any such physical separation of an account and a phone. (Trivia: Some CDMA carriers have employed a SIM equivalent called an R-UIM or removable user identity module, but not in the U.S.)

In recent years, the SIM scenario has gotten a little more complicated with the arrival of micro-SIM cards. But you can still use a micro-SIM in place of a standard card (technically a mini-SIM) if you pop it into an adapter or position it so its contacts align properly in the slot (I’ve done it, but it took a few tries). And you can cut down a SIM to micro-SIM size.

Now, however, the industry has certified a “nano-SIM” standard that is smaller still and slightly thinner. So you won’t be able to shoehorn a micro-SIM into a nano-SIM slot, and using a nano-SIM card in phones designed for bigger cards will require an adapter instead of just careful placement.

Whether saving .0037 cubic inches of space over the already tiny micro-SIM card (in context, .1 percent of the volume of an iPhone 4S, considerably less in the current crop of big-screen smartphones) is worth that complication seems to have gone unexplored. Would we be better off if everybody had standardized on micro-SIM and let designers find other ways to condense phone hardware? We’ll never know.

Manufacturing ever-smaller gadgets also imposes costs we may not notice until later on. You may find that you can’t upgrade the memory on a new laptop—a serious risk if an operating system upgrade requires more memory than the last release. Are we ready to foreclose on the idea of upgradable hardware?

Repairing a tablet or a computer can also move from tricky to difficult once its components get tightly-packed together. The same goes for recycling a defunct device—although if a manufacturer provides its own, easily accessible recycling service for those gadgets, I’ll give it a pass.

The risk in making this kind of complaint is sounding like a grumpy old man, desperately clinging to his trusty old Ethernet cable and SIM card as he stands in the way of progress and the laudable goal of making computers simple, worry-free appliances.

But at a certain point, standards friendliness, repairability and expandability should outrank shaving yet another fraction of an inch or an ounce off a product. That would leave plenty of other things companies can try to beat each other on. Did I mention battery life?

Qualms Over QAM (2012 CEA re-post)

Posted on April 12, 2013 by robpegoraro

(Since a site redesign at the Consumer Electronics Association resulted in the posts I wrote for CEA’s Digital Dialogue blog vanishing, along with everything there older than last November, I’m reposting a few that I think still hold up or shed light on current issues. This one ran on Feb. 14, 2012; the AllVid effort I mentioned at the end has gone nowhere since, but in October, the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow QAM encryption–with results that I’ll be discussing in this weekend’s USA Today column.)

This month’s telecom-policy squabble covers a TV technology that nobody seems to love–if they even know it exists.

The system in question goes by the name QAM, short for “quadrature amplitude modulation,” and it’s the only way to tune into digital cable without a box. But while “cable-ready” sets dealt fairly well with even premium channels in the mid 1990s, QAM’s horizons are far more limited.

You can’t count on QAM providing more than the “basic tier” of local broadcast stations plus public, educational and government channels. Forget ESPN or even CNN; to get those without a cable box, you need a CableCard-compliant device–which in practice means either a TiVo digital video recorder or one of a few add-on tuners for computers.

But it’s worse than that: As readers have testified and I’ve seen myself, QAM reception often presents a puzzling picture of your cable choices. Channels can appear under seemingly random numbers–and then move to new ones or disappear outright.

So the proposal now before the Federal Communications Commission to allow cable operators to encrypt QAM signals on all-digital networks–simplifying their systems while cutting off existing QAM hardware–might not seem like anything worth fussing over.

And yet for a small minority of users, QAM does work. Some use it on second or third sets (PDF); some resorted to basic-tier cable after failing to get adequate over-the-air digital-TV reception; some employ it to use computers as digital video recorders. And these subscribers don’t want it to go away.

How many people are we talking about? The Web-media-receiver vendor Boxee says that 40 percent of buyers of its new Boxee Live TV device use QAM to receive cable TV through that add-on. You could dismiss that as a figment of a small sample size; that $49 add-on has only been on sale since January. But a more established computer-video vendor, Hauppauge Computer Works, also cited 40 percent QAM usage (PDF) among buyers of its PC peripherals.

The Consumer Electronics Association has no stats for this segment of the market.

CEA has joined those manufacturers in their opposition to QAM encryption, writing in a November filing (PDF) that the FCC should decline this request unless it also moves forward on other, long-standing proposals to open up the market for TV hardware (more on that in a moment).

The cable companies’ arguments, as related over a call Friday with representatives of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, fall into three categories:

• Cable operators’ own figures suggest that almost nobody relies on QAM. Cablevision, which obtained a waiver from the FCC to start encrypting QAM after converting to all-digital service in New York, N.Y., reported that “less than 0.1 percent of subscribers” (PDF) requested a free set-top box or CableCard to decode it.

• Encryption will allow remote activation and deactivation, without sending a technician on a truck to somebody’s house. (NCTA realizes that people don’t like sitting through four-hour service windows.)

• Encryption will also stop people from tuning into basic-tier cable without paying. RCN, among other cable operators, reports (PDF) this is a growing problem among Internet-only subscribers.

It’s important to note that the the cable operators, while maybe not everyone’s favorite companies, have been way ahead of satellite vendors in the interoperability game. DirecTV users who wanted to plug in a TiVo could only wait for that service to ship its own “DirecTiVo” model; that recently arrived, years late, to complaints over its aged interface.

Meanwhile, CableCard finally seems to work as advertised–even if that’s happened too late for some pioneering CableCard vendors. Once-prominent TiVo rival Moxi Digital gave up the fight two weeks ago when its new owner, ARRIS Group, announced that it would only sell through cable operators.

There’s been a proposal afoot, against opposition from cable, to set a comprehensive pay-TV standard called “AllVid” that would work not just for cable but also satellite and fiber-optic services. It would allow every screen in a home network to tie into a simple gateway adapter–the video equivalent of the wireless router that links a cable modem and a laptop.

That’s what CEA has been asking for in return for giving up clear QAM. Boxee could also live with this tradeoff, said spokesman Andrew Kippen; Hauppauge CEO Ken Plotkin, however, was not to ready to make that deal.

Me, I think I could live with that bargain–if it included an assurance that current QAM users who will have to tolerate a new box and remote control won’t have to pay extra for them. (If encrypting QAM harms so few people and yields as many benefits as cable operators say, they should be able to afford subsidizing that hardware.)

But this is an easy thing for me to say, since I switched to over-the-air and Internet broadcasts years ago. If you pay for cable today, I’d rather know your opinion: Would you trade simple reception of entry-level cable today for easy access to a full lineup of channels a few years from now?

Where T-Mobile provides 3G service for older iPhones

Posted on March 26, 2013 by robpegoraro

T-Mobile announced today that it’s getting the iPhone. But in a practical sense, it’s “had” that smartphone since it kicked off a network “refarming” effort last year to provide 3G and HSPA+ 4G service on the 1900 MHz frequencies used by the iPhone 5 and older AT&T-specific models, then started marketing itself as a better option for unlocked iPhones. Before today’s news, the carrier said it already had more than two million unlocked iPhones on its network.

T-Mobile’s Web site, however, doesn’t get around to identifying all of these iPhone-friendly markets–an important detail, since without it you’re stuck with slow 2G “EDGE” data service. (6:59 p.m. Engadget reports that new-production iPhones, T-Mobile’s own model included, will support a wider range of frequencies. I’ve revised the title to reflect that.) T-Mobile’s coverage map doesn’t break them out, and a FAQ page only says “Check at your local T-Mobile store for network status in your area.”

(The screen shot above comes from the iPhone of my friend Paul Schreiber, who’s been keeping me updated on where he’s seen 3G service.)

So I asked a company publicist and got this reply:

The following 49 metro areas currently have 4G service in 1900 MHz. This covers 142 million people.

1. Ann Arbor, MI

2. Atlanta, GA

3. Austin, TX

4. Baltimore, MD

5. Boston, MA

6. Cambridge, MA

7. Chicago, IL

8. Dallas, TX

9. Denver, CO

10. Detroit, MI

11. Fort Lauderdale, FL

12. Fort Worth, TX

13. Fresno, CA

14. Houston, TX

15. Kansas City, KS/MO

16. Las Vegas, NV

17. Los Angeles, CA

18. Miami, FL

19. Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN

20. Modesto, CA

21. Napa, CA

22. New York, NY

23. Newark, NJ

24. Oakland, CA

25. Orlando, FL

26. Philadelphia, PA

27. Phoenix, AZ

28. Providence, RI

29. Reno, NV

30. Richmond, VA

31. Sacramento, CA

32. Salinas, CA

33. San Antonio, TX

34. San Diego, CA

35. San Francisco, CA

36. San Jose, CA

37. Santa Ana, CA

38. Santa Cruz, CA

39. Santa Rosa, CA

40. Seattle, WA

41. Springfield, MA

42. St. Cloud, MN

43. Stockton, CA

44. Tampa, FL

45. Tucson, AZ

46. Vallejo, CA

47. Virginia Beach, VA

48. Warren, MI

49. Washington, DC

Does that match your experience? Let me know in the comments.

Belated updates to this year’s stories

Posted on December 29, 2012 by robpegoraro

You don’t have to run a correction when a story changes after you’ve written about it–but it is polite to follow up. Here’s a not-so-short list of updates to stories I’ve done this year.

When I wrote that Google’s new, unified privacy policy would almost certainly be recast to let users opt out of having the company assemble a detailed portrait of them based on their use of separate Google services, I was wrong; that has yet to happen.

Sonic.net’s groundbreaking fiber-to-the-home service–a steal at $69.95 a month for 1 billion bits per second–seems to be off to a fine start in Sonoma County, but the planned expansion to San Francisco’s Sunset District is still on the way. It hasn’t shown up as an advertised offering on this Santa Rosa, Calif., Internet provider’s home-services page either.

Remember when adjacent-friend-discovery apps were going to blow up after their moment in the sun at SXSW in March? Didn’t happen. Facebook bought Glancee (and has yet to do much publicly with its technology), while Highlight seems to have fallen off the map (maybe I’m not hanging out with the right crowd?).

The ethics of outsourced manufacturing, fortunately, have stayed in the headlines since I wrote about them in March for CEA. And we may even be seeing legitimate progress, to judge from the New York Times’ story earlier this week recounting upgrades in pay and working conditions at contract manufacturers Foxconn and Quanta’s Chinese factories.

I’m still waiting to see comparable progress in liberating e-books from “digital rights management.” The sci-fi publisher Tor/Forge–a subsidiary of Macmillan–went DRM-free in July, but other branches of the major publishing houses have clung to this self-defeating measure.

After saying so many good things about the car2go car-sharing service–and seeing that story get picked up in a few other places–I have to confess that I, ahem, haven’t used the service since. Capital Bikeshare is even more convenient and cheaper for trips under two miles, plus I need to make my way into the District to jump into one of car2go’s Smart fortwo vehicles.

I tempered my praise for Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE by wondering how long its users would wait to get Google’s software updates. Answer: almost six months, the time it took HTC and Sprint to deliver the Android 4.1 release Google shipped in June.

I was pretty sure I’d buy a Nexus 7 tablet after liking it as much as I did in July. But now that I own an iPad mini, that purchase seems like it would be redundant. Am I making a mistake there?

After teeing off on Apple Maps in the first chapter of my iPhone 5 review for CNNMoney.com, I have to give Apple credit for fixing the two worst flaws I called out. It now lists the correct address for the Kennedy Center as its first search result and provides a route to Dulles Airport that don’t cross any runways. But it still doesn’t know about Yards Park or the new 11th Street Bridges across the Anacostia–and the latter omission means its directions will now send you on a closed stretch of freeway.

My upbeat review of Samsung’s $249 Google Chromebook noted some build-quality concerns, in the form of a loose corner of the screen bezel. I found out the hard way that it’s more delicate than that; its LCD is now broken, and I don’t even know how. (We do have a two-year-old at home, but it’s also possible that I dropped something on it.)

My advice about enabling multiple-calendar Google Calendar sync on an iOS device by setting up your Google account as a Microsoft Exchange account will soon be obsolete. Effective January 30, Google will no longer support Exchange syncing on new setups (although existing ones will still work). Fortunately, it’s also posted instructions to enable multiple-calendar sync without the Exchange workaround.

3/23/2013: Updated the link for the car2go review after the post vanished in a site redesign and, for CMS-driven reasons that escape me, could not be re-posted at the same address.

A cord cutter visits the Cable Show

Posted on May 26, 2012 by robpegoraro

I spent the first half of this week at a place I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome–the Cable Show, the annual convention put on by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. After my wife and I canceled our Dish Network TV service back in October of 2009 and realized we could live without pay TV, I’ve repeatedly suggested that other TV subscribers weigh that option.

Fortunately, no bouncer tossed me out of the convention center in Boston (disclosure: one reason I attended was the chance to stay with my brother and catch up with his family), and I learned a few things about the market I’ve been avoiding since 2009.

(Yes, even though one of my clients is cable giant Discovery Communications. The irony is duly noted.)

One was that there is an enormous amount of stuff to watch on TV if you’re willing to pay for it–as JetBlue reminded on my way to and from Boston. Another was that the cable industry has recognized that the cable box is not exactly everybody’s favorite gadget and is working to streamline its interface and reduce its power consumption. (My wrap-up of that awaits an editor’s attention; my photos of the show are up.)

But I also got a reminder that in some fundamental ways, the cable industry thinks it’s doing fine–NCTA president Michael Powell said in his opening keynote that “this industry has never been content to rest on aging business models”–and doesn’t need a fundamental change of course.

I don’t recall hearing the words “à la carte” spoken at any point, nor did I run into any serious discussions about the lesser step of offering subscribers a wider choice of channel bundles. “AllVid”–a nebulous proposal by the Federal Communications Commission for a unified standard for subscription-TV reception that might open the market for tuning and reception hardware–only came up when I asked an FCC staffer about it after a panel on regulatory issues had failed to mention the topic.

And you can continue to forget about paying for real-time online access to shows without the conventional cable subscription required by such Web-viewing options as HBO Go. The industry sees that and other cable-subscription-first “TV Everywhere” offerings as customer-retention moves, not ways to draw in new viewers.

And as for cord-cutting–a topic that drew me to Boston a year ago, when I led a panel about the topic at Free Press’s media-reform conference–the cable industry doesn’t seem to think it’s a serious issue. Chief executives and lower-ranking staffers all repeated that it’s not losing any viewers it would want to keep. For example, during Tuesday’s opening session, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said a predicted wave of cord cutting “didn’t happen” except for “economically challenged customers… many of who didn’t even have boadband at home.”

I thought about standing up, waving my hand and shouting “dude, I’m right here!” But I did not.

I might have also said then that my brother and his wife cut the cord last summer (while retaining a Comcast Internet connection). After day one of the show, I went home to my brother’s house and watched a few episodes of NBC’s Community on his paid-for Hulu Plus subscription. After day two, we caught an episode of HBO’s Game Of Thrones that he obtained… somehow.

Why I don’t own an iPhone

Posted on February 23, 2012 by robpegoraro

I’ve written a couple of harsh evaluations of a new Android phone this week: a review of Samsung’s Galaxy Note for Discovery News and a rant for Boing Boing about how the same old vendor-inflicted problems surface on this device.This led to predictable accusations from readers that I’m in the tank for iOS–that, as it were, I wrote those pieces while affectionately caressing my iPhone.

The problem with that scenario is that I don’t own an iPhone and never have. (My wife has a Verizon iPhone 4 from her office; sometimes she lets me borrow it to try out a new app.) My own phone is an Android device–the battered HTC Hero you see in the photo below, which has exhibited some of the best and worst qualities of Google’s operating system in the two years I’ve owned it.

I didn’t buy an iPhone in 2007, even though I found a great deal to like about it, because I was in the middle of a contract with Sprint. And even if I’d been willing to eat an early-termination fee to defect to AT&T, I would have then had a phone that I couldn’t use anywhere in the subway parts of Metro.

When my contract expired in early 2008, switching to AT&T still would have left me offline for almost all of my commute. I could not wrap my head around the idea of having to use a pay phone to call my wife or the copy desk after work. So–boy, does this look embarrassing now–I took the cheapest adequate option, the Palm Centro Sprint offered for free.

The Centro was no prize, but I figured I could limp along until Android phones arrived for Sprint or Verizon. (AT&T did not wind up offering coverage underground until October of 2009–and still doesn’t work in the two stations closest to my home.)

At my next upgrade window in early 2010, AT&T had shown itself to be a poor steward of Apple’s device by supporting picture messaging months late and failing to upgrade its network in D.C. and elsewhere. On a personal level, I didn’t care to underwrite Apple’s inscrutable App Store curation/censorship–and after enduring two rounds of the “OMG, the iPhone’s here!” get-a-life-you-people media circus, I took perverse satisfaction in thinking differently.

I’d liked the Sprint HTC Hero I’d tried out a few months before, so that’s what I went with instead. In retrospect, that represented dubious judgment on my part; I could have switched to Verizon and gotten the Droid, or I could have suffered with the Centro for another few months and picked up an Evo. Instead, I got a decent phone that got old fast.

Much of that is Sprint and HTC’s fault for abandoning it. They delivered one Android update, an upgrade to Android 2.1 that arrived after I saw Google executives demo Android 2.2, aka “Froyo,” at a developers’ conference in San Francisco. Not long after, I had to root the phone to nuke the bloatware Sprint had welded to it.

After coming back from CES in 2011, thoroughly fed up with how sluggish the phone had become, I wiped the factory software to install an independently-developed build of Android, CyanogenMod. This brought the Hero up to Android 2.2 and, for a time, rejuvenated it. My phone was vastly more responsive, had better battery life, could run new software incompatible with 2.1 and, because I could park apps on its microSD Card, no longer kept flashing “phone is running low on storage” nags. I was all set to rave about the transformation wrought by aftermarket firmware when this thing started crashing a little too often.

“A little too often” degenerated to “all the damn time.” I upgraded to the 7.0 release of Cyanogen, and that briefly fixed things while also bringing free WiFi tethering and an update to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. But this installation, too, became hopelessly afflicted with crashes as its battery life steadily decayed. Upgrading to 7.1 hasn’t improved things much. When this thing crashes for no reason–then crashes again before it can finish rebooting–I feel like throwing it at the floor. (If any of you have tips about what I could to fix this, please share in the comments.) It’s a good thing I happen to have some review phones around to lean on.

I’m now out of contract, and my options are more open than ever. I could get an iPhone 4S on Sprint or Verizon, or I could get another Android phone. As a platform, I like Android. Really. Free turn-by-turn navigation is a huge benefit that makes the iPhone look pathetic. The selection of apps is tremendous–I can’t think of any iOS-only software that I miss. Android’s onscreen widgets and (in 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich) multitasking have no parallel in iOS. I’m just afraid of what the manufacturers and the carriers might do to my next Android phone. It is reassuring that Android offers the escape hatch of third-party firmware–but would that prove as unstable as my current sorry software?

I hope I haven’t gotten myself stuck in yet another abusive phone relationship.

Reader reports on AT&T data throttling

Posted on February 7, 2012 by robpegoraro

Since my USA Today column covered AT&T’s recent habit of throttling back the connections of unlimited-data subscribers judged to be in the top 5 percent of users in a given market, I’ve been hearing from readers subjected to this penalty. To judge from their input, you really don’t want to be among the 5 percent at that carrier.

Of the five people to report getting AT&T’s warning and then having their connection throttled, all said their downloads downshifted to 100 to 150 kilobits per second. (A sixth didn’t specify a number but also said the slowdown came without a warning.) That’s about the speed of AT&T’s decade-old GPRS data service, which was barely adequate for the WAP browsers of 2002.

The screenshots at right, showing the warning sent via text message and a post-throttling bandwidth test, come from Kevin Reifel of Williamstown, N.J.

Two of these readers cited monthly bandwidth usage above 5 gigabytes, fueled by the fast LTE service on their new Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket phones. Three iPhone users, however, reported bandwidth use below or barely above the 3-GB quota of AT&T’s current $30/month option.

Dave Spenik, of Walnut, Calif., said he also received warnings for hitting just 2.1 GB and change but avoided throttling those months–matching one of the first reports I got about this issue.

There was no real pattern to the locations of these reports, aside from them coming from outer suburbs of various metro areas (Washington, Philadelphia and Los Angeles).

But–you knew this was coming–these customers do share a pronounced unhappiness with AT&T. Gaithersburg, Md., resident David Rothfeld declared: “I will never go back to ATT again.” Wrote Spenik: “I plan to lodge complaints with the FCC, Calif State Attorney General, and Calif Public Utilities Commission, and am going to begin preparation to sue in Calif Small Claims Court.” Reifel: ”I would have more respect for ATT if they simply just advised all their current unlimited data users that the plan was going away and to please pick a new plan.”

(The company did that in 2010 when it terminated an unlimited plan for users of some data-only devices.)

It’s true that most users don’t come near 2 gigs a month. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus that I’ve been testing extensively shows only 866 megabytes used over the last three weeks, nowhere near Verizon’s monthly 2 GB quota. But at least that’s an obvious limit. I would not be comfortable worrying that crossing an undefined and changing threshold would get my smartphone kneecapped through the rest of the billing cycle.

Smartphone (and tablet) battery scorekeeping

Posted on January 27, 2012 by robpegoraro

After reviewing dozens of smartphones and a few not-so-smart ones, I’ve settled on a couple of standard battery tests. To see how long the device will hang on in a best-case scenario, I’ll set it to check a couple of e-mail accounts, Facebook and Twitter (with WiFi and Bluetooth on but not connected), then let it sit on a desk and see what percent of its battery is left after 24 hours. To subject it to a far-less-forgiving trial, I will then play streaming audio through the Pandora app (with the same wireless settings and background apps active) and force the screen set to stay illuminated full-time.

I’ll note these figures in individual reviews, but as they pile up it gets harder to check back to see how a phone compares to its cohorts. That’s where this post comes in: It lists battery-life results from prior reviews and some post-publication tests, and I’ll update it each time I review a new phone. The same goes for tablet battery data, which you can see after the jump.

Keep in mind a few caveats: In some cases, especially with the oldest reviews, I may have departed slightly from the testing routines described above. Some of these figures are also approximations, on account of my not having kept whatever notes had exact times. And you could be looking at the occasional fluke result here.

Apple iPhone 4, AT&T: 95%, 6:21

Apple iPhone 4, Verizon: 93%, 6:20

Apple iPhone 5, Verizon (LTE): 85%, 7:44

Google Nexus S, T-Mobile: 47%, 7:22

HTC Evo 4G LTE, Sprint (3G only): 85%, 8:26

HTC Evo Shift, Sprint (WiMax): 66%, 77% with WiMax off

HTC First, AT&T (LTE): 65%, 7:07

HTC Inspire, AT&T: 88%

HTC ThunderBolt, Verizon (LTE): 57%, 4:20

LG Nexus 4, T-Mobile: 54%, 5:03

LG Nitro HD, AT&T (LTE): 64%, 4:31

Motorola Droid 2, Verizon: 80%, “six and a half hours”

Motorola Droid Bionic, Verizon (LTE): 70%, 4:45

Nokia Lumia 900, AT&T (LTE): 71%, 4:45 (this Web-radio test was done with the Slacker Radio app, since there was no Pandora app for Windows Phone 7; in a second try, it only lasted 4:05)

Samsung Epic 4G, Sprint (WiMax): 74%; with WiMax off, 73%, “slightly less than five hours”

Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Verizon (LTE): With WiFi on, ran out in just under 11 hours, allowed 3:56 of Pandora playback; with WiFi off, 59%, 4:04

Samsung Galaxy Note, AT&T (LTE): 37%, 6:14 (I don’t know how that would be possible on a screen with a 5.3-in. screen, but there you have it)

Samsung Galaxy Note II, AT&T (LTE): 82%, 10;19

Samsung Galaxy S, T-Mobile: 88%

Samsung Galaxy S II, AT&T: 73%, 7:05

Samsung Galaxy S III, T-Mobile: 83%, 6:37

Samsung Galaxy S 4, Sprint: 78%, 7:24

Continue reading →

Ways to read the Google-Motorola Mobility deal

Posted on August 15, 2011 by robpegoraro

Did somebody forget to remind Google that August is supposed to be a slow news month? At 7:35 this morning, the Mountain View, Calif., company announced in a blog post by CEO Larry Page that it had agreed to pay about $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility.

The sum involved alone sets this apart from the average tech merger. So do the relationships that would be upended by Google’s planned purchase of the consumer-oriented half of Motorola spun off in January. (Also unusual compared to other mega-mergers: How nobody leaked the news in advance.)

The reactions I’ve been reading this morning have fallen into three broad categories.

What does this mean for other Android phone vendors?

Motorola wasn’t the first company to ship a phone running Android, so it’s a little awkward to see Google bring it in-house while saying it will continue to license Android to such competing firms as HTC, LG and Samsung. That’s not how things usually work; normally, the operating-system developer either keeps the hardware business to itself (Apple) or lets other companies mess with circuit boards and batteries (Microsoft). There aren’t many cases of an OS vendor both shipping its own devices and licensing its software to competitors–although Palm did this for a while during the Palm OS’s heyday a decade ago, when Sony, Symbol and Handspring also shipped handheld organizers running its software.

The comical conformity of the supportive quotes from HTC, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson executives that Google trotted out this morning adds to the weirdness here. Veteran tech observer Dan Gillmor (like me, a former newspaper columnist) suggested that HTC and Samsung must be “absolutely furious.” But if Google uses its control of Motorola to strip out the bloatware that has gummed up too many Android phones, consumers may not mind. (Here’s a tip for Android phone manufacturers: Instead of wasting your time on proprietary software add-ons, get your developers and engineers working on battery life–the single weakest aspect of Android relative to other smartphone operating systems.)

Google says it will run Motorola Mobility as a separate shop, but AllThingsD’s Ina Fried and others have already suggested that it might do better to flip the company’s hardware business.

What about the non-phone half of Motorola Mobility?

Contrary to the “Mobility” moniker, this firm also makes cable boxes–a category of hardware both widely resented by consumers and one of the bigger obstacles to Google’s Google TV project. Commentators such as Tech.pinions’ Steve Wildstom, ZatzNotFunny’s Mari Silbey and GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler and Ryan Kim have all noted this morning that Google will now be in a position to ship a cable box with Google TV software built in–well, if the cable companies don’t mind shipping hardware that puts YouTube and other non-cable video services front and center on the subscribers’ TVs.

To me, this is the biggest reason for optimism about this deal.

What about the patents?

And here we have the most depressing aspect of this transaction–Google needs a stash of patents to defend Android against all the mobile-device patent lawsuits flying around. Motorola Mobility has 17,000 or so, and by gaining control of them Google can then threaten such opposing litigants as Apple and Microsoft with its own patent lawsuits–then propose to settle these fights with cross-licensing deals that extinguish the litigation but will do almost nothing to improve the products in question.

As the New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson notes in a post this morning, this demonstrates how badly the patent system has failed to promote innovation:

Meanwhile, customers and shareholders will pay for the lawyers. And engineers will spend too much time worrying about violating someone else’s patents, and not enough time figuring out how to build the next magical thing.

He’s right. Suppose we didn’t have this overhang of too-obvious tech patents that should not have been issued in the first place; can’t you think of more productive uses for $12.5 billion than procuring an extra layer of legal armor?

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Category Archives: Telecom