As me as a user I have never used any "3G-function" while having the N70 or N82. And as they arn't phones for browsering the web due to their small displays and no touch I always put the phone into 2G right from the start to get better batterylife.
But as I'm going to buy the N900 the thing changes. When I'm in school,home or at friends I can always use the wlan but there will be some time where I have to use the 3G connection. I think I won't use it more then 10 times/month so for this reason it feels quite much like a waste of battery to have the 3G net used at all times.

So to the question, both my N70 and N82 had to restart to disable 3G. Wich will be quite annoying if you just wanted to check something fast when your on the move. Will the N900 have the possibility to do this without any restart? If not why is it like this?


Yours,

You can switch between 3G and 2G. If I'm not mistaken its in the phone settings where you change from "DUAL" (3G) to "GSM" (2G). I asked one of the nokia people who confirmed it, and also Michal at my-symbian confirmed it also.

you can set the N900 to switch between these services (2g,2.5g,3g,3.5g) automatically when it detects them, no need to restart the phone...

Oh that's great! I did some 5min research about the talk time between 2G and 3G and both Sony Ericsson and Iphone says to give you at least double time!

talk time :P but not phone usage :P hehe. The screen on will drain your phone, and if you're using a CPU intensive app! haha.

yeah, but for some reason when using the 3G network, the battery gets drained more...

I believe that he refers to network mode switching in symbian devices, where you indeed need to boot the device to force it use 2G only. Of course, hopping between best network available is seamless with symbian, also...

As to why 3G needs more power I do not know, but I'd venture it has something to do with the multiple antennas (MIMO) used with 3G

3G radio definitely drains more juice compared to screen or CPU, unfortunately.

Btw, when you jump between 2G\3G and WiFi, persistent connections (ssh\vnc\rdp\etc) will have to be reset\reconnected because the IPs will change.

You no longer need to reboot for 2g/3g switch on symbian s60, atleast my e75 does it without rebooting. It automatically switches between 2G and 3G when entering and leaving 3G coverage, seamlessly, IP remains same. It also automatically switches from 3G to 3.5G if there's lots of data traffic demanding it.
The manual forcing into 2G or 3G probably requires the device to disconnect from the cellular network and reconnect and lie about its capabilities, so I doubt IP would be retained there...

Let's hope ipv6 remedies this and we get seamless transfer between ip carriers...

The best application would be a one that kept 2g 'as default' then when using specified programmes (Browser, Skype, spotify etc) switch to 3G