Palm Centro battery drains in flaky coverage

Maybe Verizon doesn’t have any “dead zones”, but one of my workplaces has what I’ll call a Maelstrom Zone. Even though I’m stationary within the Maelstrom, the Centro seems to bounce back and forth between a Verizon network and an “Extended” (read: roaming) network. Moreover, coverage swings wildly between 0 and 4 bars on just the Verizon network alone.

This results in missed calls, poor call quality, errors sending texts, and delays in receiving texts. But more annoyingly is that after a full day in the Maelstrom, the Centro’s battery has drained to a sliver. This will happen even if I barely use the device; the tidal forces of this strange vortex are enough to rip away the Centro’s life energy.

I’d love to see a log of the cell towers that the Centro is using over the course of the day, but I’ll save that experiment for another time. My main concern was how to prevent the battery from draining so drastically. I hit up some forums and wound up trying a couple of things:

Changing the Select Band parameter from Automatic to Home did NOT work. This makes some amount of sense because of the wild oscillations I see in Verizon (read: Home) network coverage while in the Maelstrom. I wish I could select an Extended band so I could verify that the issue is Verizon network coverage in the Maelstrom.

Changing Date & Time to Automatically set: Nothing WORKED!. I guess trying to keep the time updated while in the Maelstrom is pretty taxing. I went from leaving work with around 1/5 of the battery left to having maybe 4/5 left.

This entry was posted in Smartphone. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Palm Centro battery drains in flaky coverage

  1. theoden says:

    That’s cool! Maybe if I were having this problem in my home I’d cough up the $250; as it is, I’ll just deal with the annoyance of changing the Date & Time parameter. What I’d really like is a one-time charge for a tether that I can connect to my MacBook.

  2. theoden says:

    Unfortunately PdaNet only supports Windows 🙁 I could get it working by running XP in Parallels, but that’s too much hassle.

  3. gatortone says:

    Try this one out:
    http://www.mobile-stream.com/usbmodem.html

    Don’t know much about it but saw this as an option.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *