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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."
This is because the original iPhone used EDGE. If you force future version off the 3G network, talk time beats the first generation iPhone easily.
Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?
And the fact that you still get 8 hours browsing, even over LTE, is really impressive. It might be slightly shorter than browsing time on an original iPhone but how much browsing could you have got done on Edge? You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?
It comes back to the problem of looking at a raw number on a list, without thinking what that number MEANS to a user on the device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ever since i got rid of my work email account off my ipad the battery time doubled or tripled
take 10 people off the street and you will have 10 different use patterns
It's an oversimplification to assume that a company would, or should work to increase battery life. The different features have to be weighed against each other. Performance comes at the expense of battery life. A larger battery would mean a heavier, bulkier phone. Lithium ion batters today have about the same capacity of the batteries which existed when the first iPhone was released, while power efficiency of electronics has increased significantly. They could have used these advances to increase battery life, but have instead chosen to use them to increase performance.
But that's NOT as good as we can get. Apple sacrificed possible battery life for aesthetic thinness, as is their wont. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that's the best that could be done.
The typical iPhone user is only considered with the number 5.
Not really. There will be a lot of iPhone 4s users that skip this update.
Heck, they could just take what they have now, make some ridiculously minor change, and then change the name and have a whole new round of sales to the macfags.
Oh the clever wit of the hater!
Oh wait, they already did that with the 4S.
Nope. Some people did upgrade, yes, but Apple had a lot more new sales. I never got a 4s because it was a minor upgrade. And now the iPhone 5 is an upgrade over the 4s, but not very large... however it is a big jump over the iPhone 4. And that's what is really most important because most people have two year contracts. For the iPhone 4 (and older) iPhone owners, the iPhone 5 is in fact a big deal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".
If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did.
If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.
In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.
The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.
-=JML=-
The iPhone 2G only uses the edge network. 3G is more power hungry than 2G (LTE even more so). This is the point everyone is making. The article is flawed because it doesn't take this into consideration. People upgraded their phone to take advantage of the more advance features, so increased power usage should be taken into account.
My android phone battery has a much shorter battery life when I travel to some locations. I believe its a function on how much power is required to maintain contact with the nearest tower (using "4G" doesn't help). Right now I'm on the road and I'm lucky to get 24 hours of "standby" time on a single charge (standby being in quotes due to email client running in background so data is being transmitted on occasion).
My iPad2 seems to last a very long time (charge once a week range), but it's WiFi only and therefore doesn't need to use power to maintain contact with a tower miles away. Also the iPad2 models that have a wireless modem built in (CDMA or GSM) has the luxury of being able to put that modem to sleep to increase battery life since it doesn't have to accept incoming phone calls (especially when a WiFi connection is available). Also the iPad2 is able to have a physically larger battery.
My point being that "Your milage may vary" due to factors like usage pattern, location in respect to cellphone towers, and the data protocol being used.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The $20 phones from the convenience store have more battery life and equal call quality. If you are looking for a telephone they can't be beat.
If you want to talk about carrying a computer in your pocket, that's a different story, but for pure telephone use, the cheap ones are the way to go.
There is absolutely nothing new here. My Nokia in 1999 had a 10 day battery life and today I recharge my HTC One S every day. It is just a fact of life that we use phones todays for so much more that the batteries just last less. No phone has a 10 day lifespan these days.