I’m not sure I agree… I’ve used a lot of phones over the last few years – part of my job has been to evaluate them for my company. For a phone that’s advertised as being ‘Enterprise Ready’ the iPhone battery life really isn’t great. Sure the talk time mumbers stack up, but under real world use with push email, browsing, etc. from what I’ve seen so far it can’t really match the Nokia’s and HTC’s of the world. The numbers in the reviews and tests simply don’t match with what I’ve seen.

I’ve got one iPhone here that won’t last more then 5 hours between charges, and that with no calls, no bluetooth, no wifi, no GPS and no 3G. I’ll be sending that one back, but the others don’t seem to be much better to be honest.

I’m actually a big fan of the phone itself, but I’m really not sure its all that useful when you need to carry a charger round with you all day.

These “Oh isn’t the battery life terrible” views are like the conversation I had with someone who was disappointed about the MacBook Air and it’s lack of “stuff” that he thought he needed. Like early tablet and UMPC users did before – you just get used to it.

Same with 3G phones, you learn to live with the battery. Although I do wonder if the constant switching between 2G and 3G can be the main culprit – this used to be a regular feature of the 3G network in the UK (and still is in some areas). You drop out of 3G and the phone wastes its battery seeking out new 3G networks (easy to test it yoruself, see how quickly the battery drains when you don’t have a signal).

In recent years my 3G signal has been pretty strong at work, and battery life has improved because of that.

I was at a really dull baseball game a couple of evenings ago with the 3G and the Sprint Touch. Both had been fully charged when I left for the game and I hadn’t used either since pulling the plug so I thought I’d see how they stacked up. With bluetooth off, Wifi off (on the 3G, no wifi on the Touch) and 3G on and the Rev-A system on the Touch, I started browsing around, playing music, watching video, text messaging and using one to call the other and vice versa. After 3 hours of this, both had burned through about half their battery. “About” because neither really has an accurate gauge and I really wasn’t interested in being all scientific and anal about it. By that time the 3G had only been through a couple of charge cycles but the Touch had only been through a couple of dozen as it had been a replacement for one that had fried from heat. So I’d say that, for me, there’s no real difference in battery between what I had and what I now have.

By introducing an EDGE phone first, they can now say “I told you so” to people who complain about 3G performance. Because you can double battery life by turning off 3G, you can prove it to yourself.

Even though no other 3G phone does much better than the iPhone, some people still want to blame Apple, or AT&T for delivering exactly what they promised.

Kinda like saying that selling 1 Million phones in 3 days is a fiasco; because they should have sold 2 million, rather than the predicted 500,000.

Ignoring the topic at hand, James, why do you refer to discussions in the “intrawebs”? (I have noticed that in other posts as well). As far as I know, the common meaning of intranet (and intraweb) is “internal network of an organization/company”. Any discussion that’s happening on internal sites of my company wouldn’t be accessible to you :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraweb

(sorry to be picky… or maybe I am missing something).

James,

Do you have any info on some batteries that attach to the iphone for some extra battery life? I’ve heard of them and seen some pics, they make the phone look a lot longer. They supposedly add double the battery life though. Any suggestions of which ones are better? Ever used one?

I often find myself turning off EVDO connectivity on my Mogul for the same reasons– if the EVDO signal isn’t very strong, it will constantly flicker back and forth between EVDO and 1X-CDMA which kills the battery really quickly.

In areas the EDGE coverage is better than 3G, any GSM phone will act the same way and have the same issues.

I’ve been using my iPod touch a lot more since the 2.0 update and I’ve found, to my surprise, that I can blow the whole charge in a couple of hours! Before, when I just used it as an MP3 player, the charge would go for days. Now that I can practically do anything I want with it, the battery life has become a big issue. I was aware that it would be, but the magnitude of the problem still caught me off guard.