iPhone 3G battery life
Follow-up to I admit it, I cracked… from Steve's blog
After a just a few days of playing with the new toy, my main problem with it was the battery life. I seems to get somewhere between 24 and 36 hours between charges. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised because I’m doing so much more with it that I ever did with a phone. I have WiFi & 3G enabled, and push email from Warwick’s exchange and 15 minute polls of my gmail account. And that’s before I do any surfing and other stuff. When you take all that into account, actually 36 hours between charges isn’t too bad. And the buzz on the web seems to suggest that the iPhone’s battery life is at least as good as, if not better that, most other similar smartphones.
But it does still leave me with a problem. Every once in a while I’m away from power for more than a couple of days. For example, for a week during the summer I’ll be in a tent in the middle of a field. Not a power socket in sight. Am I going to have to carry another phone to make sure I can last the week?
To try and answer that question I ran an experiment today. I turned off all the smart stuff. No WiFi. No 3G. No push or pull of email. No surfing. Just a 2G phone. As it happens, I had no calls either. The phone was configured like this after a charge yesterday evening and 24 hours later the battery indicator hadn’t moved from the green 100% full state. That’s good news. I take that to mean at least 4 days of use, and probably more, if configured just as a phone. I don’t plan on running the experiment that long, though. I can’t leave all the fun stuff turned off that long! I’ll find out for sure when I’m in my tent:-)
Actually, I do carry a FreeLoader which has an internal battery charged from solar panels, but also chargeable separately. In this country, this summer, I expect the solar panels to be useless but I’ll at least have one full re-charge for the iPhone. That should get me through the week, possibly even with a little spare for fun stuff!!!
Steve Rumsby
16 Jul 2008 21:19
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Tags: Gadgets Iphone
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Comments (5)
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Hamid Sirhan
Glad to hear it’s semi-decent. I take it the battery isn’t replacable at whim (i.e. you have to remove the case to get the battery out) which means a spare is ruled out? Which is a bit of a shame because with other smartphones you may be able to get 36hrs of use but be able to take a spare with you.
I’d be interested to know if they had any of those wind-up chargers for the iphone.
17 Jul 2008, 16:36
Steve Rumsby
The battery is officially not user-replaceable. In the old iPhone it was soldered in. Those people brave (or stupid) enough to take apart an iPhone 3G already have discovered that the battery in the new iPhone isn’t soldered in. So, while you do still need tools to do the job, and so you can’t sensibly carry a spare to swap out when you run low, you may not have to return the device to Apple for a new battery when the first one finally dies.
My previous PDA was a Palm m505, which equally does not have a user-replaceable battery. But with the right tools it took me 10 minutes to swap the battery, for a total cost of £10. I expect in a year or two, when everybody’s iPhone batteries start dying, there’ll be plenty of websites around with instructions on how to do it, and you’ll be able to get the batteries themselves on ebay.
I don’t see why hand chargers won’t work, so long as they have the right connector. It’ll take a long time, though, to generate a phone-full. I wouldn’t want to do it every day. A pre-charged Freeloader or equivalent makes more sense to me.
17 Jul 2008, 16:47
Steve Rumsby
A quick battery update. After a bit of googling around I decided it could well be the push email that is eating the battery. The reasoning is that for push to work the iPhone has to keep an IP connection open to the server the whole time, which doesn’t do the battery any favours. So this weekend I’m running another experiment. I’ve got push turned off and I’m fetching email one an hour, but otherwise I’m using it as it was intended. A bit of email, a bit of surfing, a bit of music, etc. So far, after 24 hours, the battery is one quarter gone. Once again, this is very encouraging. Four days of battery by being careful, but not too careful, is ok by me.
And this comment was sent from the iPhone, too. More on the on-screen keyboard in another post…
20 Jul 2008, 08:09
Adam F
Interesting comments.
I have just upgraded from a 2g phone to 3g (running 2.1 firmware) and I have to say that the battery life on the 3g phone is at least 25% worse with 3g and Push mail turned on – I don’t use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on the phone.
Possibly I have a faulty phone?
22 Sep 2008, 13:46
Steve Rumsby
My understanding is that push makes a big difference. The reason for that, as I’ve had it explained to me, is that the phone has to keep an open connection to Exchange so that Exchange knows to keep pushing updates, and keeping an IP connection open the whole time uses power the whole time. Switching to a 15 minute fetch made a big difference to the battery life of my iPhone. I don’t know how much difference 3G makes. I always leave it on.
22 Sep 2008, 14:45
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