WiFi or 3G, which eats more Power?

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i use WiFi @ home and work, 3G everywhere else.

my battery was over 50% before bed, woke up with am with 5% left.....
so 45% of my battery life was eaten up in 8 hours with NO use?

any thoughts?

Wifi seems to be a real battery eater on this device (along with GPS). I leave it switched off unless I'm actively using it, and have no problems with battery life (it would last >24 hours if I let it.. I charge overnight though).

As there's no 3G switch on the widget I don't ever switch that off so haven't seen what improvement that would give. Cell Standby is still the largest user of battery, so maybe it would.

Set wifi to sleep when screen turns off.

There's an option for that? Not seen that one..

Originally Posted by muncheese

Set wifi to sleep when screen turns off.

I didn't know you could do that, however, i already have that option selected....after i found it in the menu.

i guess i'll just have to experiment and see if 3G saves me power over the weekend.

Yeah I am pretty sure that option is the default. It still definitely drains more power with the WiFi enabled than without, sleeping or not. Not sure vs 3g, I disable or enable both as I need them.

I thought Wifi drains very little power ... with my phone on airplane mode and wifi only, the battery lasts over 30 hours with Meebo on, push e-mail on, and e-mail sync every 15 min.

Likewise, I have gps/wifi/2g/screen widgets on my main home page.

This doesn't exactly apply to the OP, but there's a nice app called "Y5 - Battery" in the market that switches off the WiFi radio in areas that you usually don't use WiFi.

Also, you can see what's draining your battery if you go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Use. There's some cool graphs showing where all your battery went since the last charge. Maybe you have a program that's running in the background that's sucking up all your battery.

I have had some battery drain issues since I received my N1 3 days ago. I found that Android 2.1 has a nice battery log (/d/battery_log) which updates every 50 - 55 seconds. In doing some tests to see what was killing my battery I can tell you that it isn't WiFi.

I would say that when in use, 3G draws a bit more than WiFi when actively used, but when WiFi is just idle it seems better than when 3G is connected and not in use.

In case anyone cares...I am still isolating all of the battery drain issues, but one of the biggest I have eliminated by uninstalling seems to be from BeautifulWidgets. I found it hard to believe, but my testing seems pretty clear. I also have a decent draw whenever I'm in the car with Bluetooth sync going. I would have had a hard time confirming this without this battery log file.