Slashdot Mirror
Is iPhone Battery Usefulness On the Decline?
jfruh writes "Every time a company rolls out a new version of a product, it extols how much better it is than the previous version. Thus, Apple spent a part of its iPhone 5 rollout touting the staying power of the latest version of its battery. But have iPhone batteries really seen improvement since the original came out in '07? Kevin Purdy crunches the numbers and concludes that, while the 5's battery beats the 4S's, we still haven't returned to the capabilities of the original phone."
It remains to be seen if the iPhone 5 can really pull off 8 hours of LTE browsing
Yes, but remember that in every device Apple has shipped (from laptops to iPhones to iPads) the battery life estimates have been pretty much spot on.
as that would be impressive (blow through your data cap on a single charge)
Browsing is not watching media only. Browsing is loading pages, reading them, moving on and reading more. It's not about constant data streaming, so it's not overall something that will destroy your bandwidth - you can only read so much in eight hours!
Yes you could blow through bandwidth fast if you sat watching extremely high quality video for hours on end. But that is why mobile app developers are not giving you those really beefy data streams, instead over even LTE you'll get reduced quality video from most things unless you force the issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, simple hydraulics and electronics have natural analogies, in that similar equations can be used for both. Milliamp-hours is a unit of charge, 1 mAh == 3.6 coloumbs, or about the charge in 3.73e-05 moles worth of electrons, so yes, it would be accurate to say that mAh can be analogised to the volume of a tank of petrol, as charge would be the equivalent of fluid volume in hydraulics. However, voltage, being in units of energy per unit charge (a volt is 1 joule per coloumb), is more like fluid pressure in hydraulics (joules per cubic metre or pascals), or at how much pressure the fuel is being sent out the gas tank, so the article is completely wrong on that score. The "amount of fuel the device is drawing" is more like current, which is measured in amperes (coloumbs per second), which would be the equivalent of flow rate in hydraulics (cubic metres per second). Thus, if you had a battery rated at 1500 mAh used on a device that drew 100 mA of current from it on use, you'd be able to use it for about 15 hours before you needed to recharge the batteries. In a similar way, if you had a tank with a volume of 1500 cubic metres and were pumping liquid out at 100 cubic metres per hour, you'd need to refill it after 15 hours.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Sure there is. General>Network and top of the page is enable/disable 3G
The whole article is fluff link bait. It's a blog post on someone's opinion spread over three pages (2.25 actually, 5 sentences on the last page) to increase ad revenue.
I cringed at that notion as well and it was misinterpreted from it's source by a dipwit that claimed to do research at the outset of the article but simply Google'd some links together that are basic speculation and rumors.
There were no tests done, there were no graphics, not even a source for the technical data (not that the author would be able to interpret it correctly). Also, mixing the 3G and 2G capabilities and not understanding or explaining the difference and which one would be used at any point in time. Also, the iPhone's don't have Li-Ion batteries, they have Li-Polymer, a huge difference.
From the sparse sources claimed and misinterpreted in this article I can see:
On 2G:
iPhone - 8h talk time, 250h standby
iPhone 3G - 10h talk time, 300h standby
iPhone 3GS - 12h talk time, 300h standby
iPhone 4 - 14h talk time, 300h standby
On 3G:
iPhone - non-existent (but we'll take 8 as the base)
iPhone 3G - ~8h talk time
iPhone 3GS - ~8h talk time
iPhone 4 - 7h talk time
iPhone 4S - 8h talk time
iPhone 5 - 8h talk time
Has the battery decreased? Not really. Give or take a few given the circumstances (signal strength etc.) but probably not noticeable.
Have the features and speed increased? Yes.
When does your phone (any, not just limited to iPhone) use 3G vs 2G: It depends. The cell phone operator (or more accurately the tower) makes that decision based on the capabilities of your phone, availability of the spectrum and congestion. Which is better: 3G. Why: less congestion and more bandwidth. Why does it use more power: better voice quality, different frequencies and also continues receiving other data (e-mail and such) in the background.
There, I re-wrote the article probably much better from a technical viewpoint and it fits in a Slashdot comment.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com