1204986 - Autophone - investigate using Airplane mode to reduce power consumption by cellular radio

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Testing Graveyard :: Autophone, defect)

Description

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

While poking around the web looking for "stuff" related to possible fixes for some issues with Autophone's devices I found out that you can actually enable wifi while in airplane mode. Who knew? ;-)

This has the benefit of turning off the cellular radio while still allowing wifi networking and eliminating one of the larger drains on the battery. Experimenting with my local devices, I found that the nexus one devices running android 2.3 would not persist the wifi state after a reboot but my samsung gs3 running android 4.0 would. It should be possible to run our devices in airplane mode and to call svc wifi enable on start up and after reboots to make sure that wifi is enabled.

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

great idea.  Could we also turn off the screen as well?  If wifi doesn't persist, could an agent ensure it is turned back on?

Comment 2

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

I don't know how to turn off the screen at the moment. I suspect it might interfere with tests which want to take screenshots or similar issues. Not sure if we optimize and not do layout when the screen is off either. I know we used to do that when css specified display:none.

I was thinking that I would just check it when starting autophone and immediately after rebooting. Issuing a svc wifi enable and waiting for the ip address to be set should be sufficient.

Comment 3

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

That sounds like it should work -- good idea!

Comment 4

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Autophone is going away. Resolving these to wontfix.