Technology Lessons learned by using a 4G smartphone

[DrJosephKim]

I've used a number of smartphones over the years and recently I got my first 4G smartphone. There are a few reasons why I think that a 4G smartphone isn't an optimal choice for medical students and residents:

1. Battery life is still very poor on the majority of these 4G smartphones. If you're on call, you don't want to lug around 2 spare batteries in your coat pocket.

2. You probably don't need 4G speeds if you're spending a lot of time in a hospital that's equipped with WiFi.

3. Higher price associated with these new devices. If you're a medical student or resident, you're probably on a fairly tight budget. If you can afford to be an early adopter, then go for it.

These are just my initial impressions given that 4G is still in its early stages.

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[JacobSilge]

Hmm, having been a very early adopter of 4g, I feel that I have a slightly different perspective. In the interest of full disclosure, I have an HTC EVO 4g so it is very possible that there are other problems specifically with LTE phones.

1. Battery life is poor if you keep 4g on continuously. However, when I'm in the hospital for 30 hour shifts, it is extremely easy to toggle the widgets to turn off 4g and turn on WiFi. Doing this I have yet to have the battery dip below the 15-20% range during a 30 hour shift.

2. This is probably true, seeing as though I have WiFi both at home and in the hospital and you absolutely don't need 4g (or even 3g for that matter) for taking care of e-mail, my predominant usage while traveling. However, I did find 4g extremely valuable while going on residency interviews since I could tether the connection at the hotel to save on paying for WiFi. And the tethered 4g connection was usually as fast or faster than hotel WiFi!

3. Higher prices - this more than likely depends on the carrier. My EVO was $200 on contract at launch, which seems to be pretty standard. The EVO shift came out at $150. In terms of data prices, even with the 4g fee, my plan was less expensive than a regular 3g plan on AT&T or Verizon and equivalent to a 3g plan on T-mobile. However, if you require Verizon's coverage, I'm sure it actually would be much more expensive.

 

[movax]

1. Battery life is still very poor on the majority of these 4G smartphones. If you're on call, you don't want to lug around 2 spare batteries in your coat pocket.

Early chipsets are rushed to market before design and process improvements can be implemented. CDMA phones picked up a bad rep for short battery-life when they first launched, as GSM (TDMA) phones had a good stock of mature chipsets and radios to build off on.

That said, I believe most (if not all) smartphones offer you a widget where you can control every radio in the phone (4G, 3G, BT, WiFi, etc. Some you can even tweak further to disable 3G data and only retain voice functionality). Turning off 4G should hopefully bring your battery life back to that of a comparable 3G phone.

And as always, running the screen at minimum brightness helps a ton too.

2. You probably don't need 4G speeds if you're spending a lot of time in a hospital that's equipped with WiFi.

True, it's also likely that the WiFi radio will be more power efficient than the 4G radio. Only times I could see 4G coming in handy is when you want unfiltered access to the Internet, or like above posted mentioned, you're on the go/travelling and want fast, unfiltered internet access.

3. Higher price associated with these new devices. If you're a medical student or resident, you're probably on a fairly tight budget. If you can afford to be an early adopter, then go for it.

Definitely no denying this, and I think some providers also charge an extra $/mo. for 4G functionality. Only thing you can really do is get one whilst signing a contract so the phone is subsidized.