Originally Posted by cargoship
I did a very stupid thing a while back. I was flying to Tokyo and my GSM was obviously no use over there, so I tossed it into my suitcase. I had a rented Japanese PHS phone in my carry-on case.
It was only when I was somewhere over the Pacific when I started wondering if I had turned the phone off or not...
Yup, it was left on the whole time. When I got to my Tokyo hotel and opened up the suitcase, it was on and had plenty of juice left....
Has anyone done something as stupid as I've done?
I don't check bags and I certainly wouldn't check them wiht anything valueable in it if I could help it, but, some wireless electronics will execute a backoff algorithm searching for a signal (whereby if it doesn't find a signal in a minute it will wait two minutes, four, etc), and a phone not searching for a signal with no display running is really consuming next to no power...