A cellular modem can make or break the smartphone experience. If the cellular modem is fast and reliable, you’ll be able to do fun things quickly—load webpages, share photos on Facebook and be less likely to drop voice calls. But speed isn’t the only feature—the modem should also be power-efficient or else the fun will come to an abrupt end.
Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ mobile processors place equal priority on creating cellular modems that are superior in performance and as power efficient as its CPUs and GPUs. Smartphones that use Snapdragon processors have cellular modems integrated into the processor. Devices with Snapdragon processors are designed to allow the integrated modem to use very little power, so the device battery will last all day.
To illustrate how little power these modems use, we took two test boxes that can monitor power and connected them to two smartphones—one with a Snapdragon processor and one with a competitor’s cellular modem.
How we did the test:
The smartphone batteries were bypassed. That way, both phones are fed the same voltage (3.7 volts). The boxes are also able to measure the current passing through the phones. We then placed a phone call to each phone so you can see how much current is being used during the phones calls. With the displays on and off, the Snapdragon powered smartphone is the least power-hungry in the modem department. See the results for yourself.
