Battery drain - Idle wifi connection & email

[jsuggs]

How much of a battery drain is it to open a program (web, email, etc) and specify a wifi connection then keep it in the background? It continues to show that the connection is active on the standby screen, but does it actively maintain that connection or only use it as needed?

I'm not a power user (yet) but I would like to know what does/doesn't eat up my battery.

FYI, my *real* reason for asking this question is because of email. I'm trying out ProfiMail (and I like it for the most part), but want to know the consequences of leaving a connection open (wifi when at home/office and gprs when out) so that it can automatically check for new mail (how do other people handle this?).

Last question, is there a way to have the program use a wifi connection but automatically fallback to a gprs connection when not available? Because if the answer to my first question about wifi battery drain is "not that much" then I could just set it up to poll every X minutes and not have to worry about switching between connections when I am on the move...which would be AWESOME!

[Gizmoratty]

When you see any notification of a connection to a WLAN, you will always be losing more battery than normal, regardless of the data transfer (Or lack of) happening at that precise moment. This is due to a constant packet retrieval system to basically keep the two devices 'talking'

In this state, the phone is not wasting alot of power compared to when you are downloading or actively using the connection, so this mode is still quite a popular choice for some users, though if you value your battery, I would definitely recommend turning it off whenever you can

[IJM]

Well if this helps you in normal terms, my phone battery lasts around a day on mild use each day, sometimes longer.

I once kept the GPS on full and used my phone as normal to see how much more it dropped. I lost approx 1h45mins of normal battery time from having the Wlan connected the entire time.

I have also used the Wlan for MSN and web browsing as well as 50/100 texts and around 3 18 min phone calls. My battery lasted around 7 hours.

Thats more than enough for me. The battery life is crap, but chargers are so common and cheap now. I have one at home, one at work, one in the car and one in my finacees house. And also a spare battery if I am out all day on a walk, or on a full day on the lash with the football lads, I just take a spare battery.

[jsuggs]

Thanks for the responses, they must have done some pretty good optimizations for power consumption with the WLAN as on my old phone (iMate PDA2K) it would tear through the battery in no time flat (whether actively used or not).

So how do people get email notification? I tried out using the built in Messaging software and it worked pretty well. But if I wanted to use something other than the built in program, then I will have to keep the program running or is there some other way to have it be able to access the network at set intervals?

[IJM]

Originally Posted by jsuggs

Thanks for the responses, they must have done some pretty good optimizations for power consumption with the WLAN as on my old phone (iMate PDA2K) it would tear through the battery in no time flat (whether actively used or not).

So how do people get email notification? I tried out using the built in Messaging software and it worked pretty well. But if I wanted to use something other than the built in program, then I will have to keep the program running or is there some other way to have it be able to access the network at set intervals?

If you download and install a seperate email program, you enter the settings as required and then each time you go to "retrieve" email headers or full emails it'll either ask what connection you want ( as in easy lan, wap etc ) or it'll let you enter a preferred connection method which will connect each time you retreieve or send an e-mail.

No need for it to be connected all the time when your not using the E-Mail client program.