There is a contrastive study on power consumption between 4G mobile phone and
3G phone, which shows that the consumption of 4G phone is much larger than 3G phone
and it is about 5%-20% difference. Why?
All the 4G mobile phone adopts MIMO technology, which supports multi parallel
transportation. MIMO requires to built-in two or more antennas in the device and each antenna has its own power amplifier.
3G phone only supports single antenna. It simply like that one battery supports two phones. Even though screen has been locked, the phone is still working. 4G LTE phone are
sweeping the radio wave continually to decide to receive which signal. Because there
are GSM, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and CDMA2000 in the current mobile communication network. Other sides, the
4G network is less than 2 years with a low coverage. If the 4G network is the first choice
for a 4G LTE mobile phone, it has to search for the signal frequently, which increases the
power consumption.
The other ignored reason is that the configuration of 4G mobile phone is higher and higher: Octa core 64 bit processor and 2K resolution, high bright screen. Tumid system, more
service lead to larger consumption. However, there is little improvement in the battery
performance.