iPhone battery life
The iPhone is the best portable computer I have ever owned, in every regard but one – the battery life for me was shockingly bad. When it reached the point where I could not go a full day without charge, I decided that I would have to return the device, because it was not useful as a phone if it could not make and receive calls all day without juice.
Before boxing it up, I did some research though – the iPhone Battery life information on the Apple site explained that my experiences should have been different, I should have seen “5 hours of talk time on 3G, 5 hours of Internet use on 3G, 6 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi, 7 hours of video playback, or 24 hours of audio playback and up to 300 hours of standby time” (from Apple site). The mistake I had made was to assume I could charge it from the USB port on my computer, since the cable supplied with the phone is a usb to iPhone cable. A few weeks of exclusive charge on this cable means that you are guaranteed to have poor battery performance, whereas charging from the mains on the supplied adapter leads to better performance. I wish someone had pointed that out to me explicitly.
Empirically, I also found that reducing screen brightness was the most effective way of preserving battery life when the phone is in use, and turning off bluetooth and 3g is the best way to preserve life when you are using it infrequently.
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3 Responses to “iPhone battery life”
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March 19th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Is this a permanent degradation in battery performance or will it recover after a period of mains charging?
March 20th, 2009 at 1:19 am
Should have got a G1 instead. I got one recently and was concerned about how the battery would perform after reading various comments about poor performance online.
So I bought an extended life battery that came with a replacement back cover. Added 5mm to the thickness of the phone but upped it from 1150mAh to 2600mAh, more than doubling the amount of time between charges.
I finished writing an application today for the phone to record the charge level every two minutes, and then upload the results to my server every 10 minutes which then graphs it: https://secure.grepular.com/rrd/g1/battery-day.png
It’s quite interesting stuff. People always advise that you should do stuff like turn off bluetooth/wifi/3g to save power. Now I’m going to be able to look first hand at just how effective doing that actually is. Hmmm, maybe I should write a tech blog for this sort of stuff.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:25 am
MG – I don’t know
Mike – That’s a little obsessive, but very impressive and interesting. Sadly the iPhone does not have an extended battery option otherwise I would have taken it. Battery life is my only disappointment with this device, but since it is a device that is designed for battery use it’s a bad flaw.