Firstly, I’m not crazy because this happens to my friends also. Whenever we go to the Borgata casino in Atlantic City, we notice that our fully charged cellphones show that they’re out of batteries in about an hour. We can still use them for quite some time after that. But they do run out of power much faster than normal, even when we don’t use them. This only happens at this specific casino. At first, we thought it was a tool that the Borgata used so that people don’t waste their time talking on cellphones. But I figured that it would be easier just to block all cellphone signals. Any idea why this happens?
Perhaps the casino is farther away from a tower and your cell phone is using up power looking for a tower.
I don’t think this is true, because the signal is fine when you’re talking. Plus, it’s Atlantic City and not some rural location. And I have Verizon, which has the best service in these parts.
Can you actually get a signal there?
If not (or even if the signal is weak, due to metal walls in the way or something), it could be that your phone is ramping up the transmission power (and the amplification of the incoming signal and also searching for a connection more frequently.
There are such things as cellphone blockers that send out corrupted ‘connect’ signals (or something like that, I’m not sure of the terminology), forcing the phone to scan continuously for a signal, but I think these are illegal in most places.
Does your phone pick up analog signals when digital isn’t available? Many phones would denote this by having a little ‘D’ that goes away when not digital.
Analog, particularly in marginal coverage, will eat power a lot faster.
I would echo the analog mode theory. That chewed up the batteries in a phone of mine in Denver last summer.
So not only did I get a poorer signal, the batteries ran out faster!
I didn’t check to see if I was getting a digital signal. I’ll have to do that next time.