[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] mymegabyte:
I'm working on a way to evaluate this.. I agree with mattk_r that it will probably vary drastically by region, usage, configuration, network, etc. But at least for my case, wi-fi is almost always off and my phone is in 'sleep'/'suspend' with Flexmail email running an IDLE (PUSH) IMAP email session in the background. Just a note, the way this works, the phone still gets to sleep and anytime a packet/data is received over the GPRS/3G connection the phone is woken up in unattended mode (no backlight) so that the maill app can process the message and notification then the phone returns to sleep state. So my goal is to pseudo-scientifically figure out which radio works best for my use.

To figure that out I have written a pair of programs that simulate the IMAP IDLE connection of an email client. (Why not use the real thing? I want the experiment to be the same everytime I run it, I can't guarantee that with email and software that I don't know the intricacies of.) One half runs on the phone to simulate the phone email client, and one half runs on a server that sends periodic messages to the phone to wake it up. When the phone is waken up it sends its current estimate of the battery life remaining (as reported by Windows API) to the server for logging.

In order to run my tests, everynight I have/plan to do the following procedure.

Flash a new radio to the phone for test

Charge the battery fully

Soft-Reset phone

Run my program

And then in the morning I dump the server log and generate a nice pretty graph of battery remaining v. hours on. This has obvious deficiencies such as

The phone never actually moves, it is on my nightstand so this won't simulate an active day where the radio is having to select the best tower.

When I wake up my battery is not dead, so I am not able to measure time from total charge to total discharge.

Even with these deficiencies and possibly more, I believe that this will give a decent benchmark as to which radios perform better than others. (in terms of battery life) So far I have conducted this for 2 nights and 2 radios, both running in 2G mode. The next two nights I will probably re-run the tests for 3G enabled just to see if that causes a significant change in the result.

So see this pretty graph to see what's happened so far... I'll post updates as I progress.

Oh yeah, I'm on ATT/Cingular Network in USA/TX.

Results in summary:

So far, I have tested radios 1.47.30.10 and 1.54.30.10 and gotten practically identical results for battery life. In my day of use for each radio, I have not noticed any call quality issues with either radio.

Other techniques: ?

There probably are other techniques to accomplish this, such as a program that measures battery discharge current. My gut feeling is to not trust these for this analysis because those programs typically have a low sampling rate and I don't know where they get there information and if that is a reliable source. And the other problem, I haven't found any such programs that can do it when the phone decides to go into the sleep mode and radio is having to maintain an idle but yet present connection to the cellular network.

Feedback anyone? Ideas?