Anyone use their phone for tethering to their ipad/tablet. It’ll be a 4G phone so probably tethered via wifi rather than Bluetooth. What’s the effect on the phone battery life?

I find my battery goes down quickly when I tether my iPad to my iPhone.

And me. Around 90 minutes on a Nexus4.

WiFi tethering is far more efficient than bluetooth. Bluetooth eats battery pretty rapidly.

I’ll be relying on tethering for a bit later, so I’ll try to remember to keep an eye on the battery life and report back, but I’ve done a good two hours tethering before without any issues before.

This is all on an iPhone 5.

You are basically making a phone call + powering whatever you use to talk to the tethered device (USB/Bluetooth/wifi).

So yeah, it eats battery fairly quickly.

I’d expect around 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours. It’s about as bad as it gets for battery, especially in poor or variable signal [like on a train, where you might actually use it 🙄 ].

Also – @ grahams – you’ll be using the CPU much more than a phone call to handle all the translation and arbitration required for

Network>Modem>phone data flow>drivers>WiFi etc

I’m tethering now on WiFi with an iPhone 5.

I’ve used ~25% battery in the hour and ten I’ve been sat here. Using iTunes Match to steam music to my phone too.

If you have a cable, you obviously plug the phone into your laptop though, and charge it via your laptop (assuming thats what you’re tethering) so battery becomes a non issue.