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."

Comments

False Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:False Comparison

[Telvin_3d]

Sure there is. General>Network and top of the page is enable/disable 3G

Re:False Comparison

[jbolden]

Apple from a profit standpoint would much rather have a big cheap battery than the incredibly expensive light thin batteries they have. Heck they would rather sell the phone hooked up to a car battery and give you 1000 hrs talk time. Light and thin is costing them money, this isn't about penny pinching.

Re:False Comparison

[jbolden]

Apple isn't doing anything differently in this regard than any other phone manufacturer.

They use the highest density most expensive option. A few years ago this cost quite a bit more and fewer companies used them.

However, as a consumer, i'd rather a design concept like the motorola razr maxx, prepared to have a bit more thickness if it means the phone will last a weekend without charging.

I understand. I own the MacBook Pro Retina which made huge sacrifices for thin and light. People really like thin and light when they see it, when they try it. But just like the move from desktops to laptops, thin and light likely means 30% less device for 30% more money.

More power for the same battery life is Good

[Anonymous Coward]

And as competitive as smartphones are today that's close to as good as we'll get for a bit. There IS a type of Lithium-ion battery that can store twice the charge of today's batteries at the same volume, but that's apparently coming to electric cars first; which obviously spend a lot more on batteries per unit and are in far more need of it.

But expect these batteries in phones at some point. In the further future the most promising technology is lithium-air batteries, which offer up to 10x the current charge per volume as today. But there are still numerous problems with them, and so an ETA there would be indefinite but quite possibly less than a decade. Still, imagine a phone that would need charging less than once a week!

Better in all the ways that matter

[SuperKendall]

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.

depends on use

[alen]

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

Re:Jokes on them!

[cameloid]

Sometimes it IS necessary to upgrade though, it can save you real money. I used to spend $$ on firewood for sending smoke signals; but then I made a one-off payment by switching to semaphore flags. Simples!

Apple pretty accurate on battery estimates

[SuperKendall]

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.

Not at all.

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Oh, the milliamp-hours!

[dido]

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.

Funny but informative

[SuperKendall]

The iPhone 5 is crap compared to the new iPhone 6 that will come out next spring.

Humorous.

And yet in that comment lies a revelation of why Apple's supposedly boring updates are not a problem.

Because from the 4 to the 4s, it was not that much of a leap. Or so it seemed at the time.

But now from the 4 to the 5, that is actually a pretty big jump. So even though we might see something like a 5s next year, you can be pretty sure that waiting for that will not be an amazing leap over the 5 - so there's little point to wait. And yet when the 6 does come out a year or two from now, it will probably be a really impressive gain over the iPhone 5.

Re:HUGE DECLINE

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone 4 lasted me (now my wife)

You married your iPhone 4? That's being too much an iFanBoi.

Re:Jokes on them!

[Anonymous Coward]

You think you're saving money?
After getting a mating pair of carrier pidgeons, my transmission costs are minimal, and my bandwidth just keeps increasing. Sure there are a few lost packets to aircraft, bb guns and Richard Gere, and latency is high, but we're talking reverse data cap here.

Re:No

[PNutts]

And I'll add that I agree they are useful. Without the battery my iPhone's screen is too dark and I can't hear the audio.

Re:Oh, the milliamp-hours!

[guruevi]

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.