Ardent Meridian… incoherent rambletastic techno-babble …

Across the various forums I participate in, I’ve read a lot about people having issues with the battery life on the iPhone 3G.  While I am sure there are defective units out there, as best I can tell most of the issues being encountered are due to the way people are using the phone.

This screenshot, taken on my iPhone 3G, shows pretty typical battery life for me under "normal" use.  Normal use in my case constitutes running with 3G and Location Services (GPS) disabled, WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, push e-mail turned off (fetch every 15 minutes) and the screen at 60%.

If I am out and about and browsing I will switch to 3G mode for that, and then usually remember to turn it off … sometimes not.  I rarely use location services, and again tend to turn it on as needed.

Actual use of the device in this example breaks down like this:

• 1.5 hours making phone calls.
• Sending/receiving about 20 SMS text messages.
• 3.5 or so hours listening to music.
• About 20-30 minutes browsing (checking prices while out shopping) in 3G mode.
• Roughly an hour and a half gaming (MotionX Poker, Galcon and Enigmo).
• Reading e-mails as they popped up, on a 15 minute fetch cycle.

And that’s a pretty normal day’s use for me, and very comparable – maybe slightly better than my previous AT&T "Tilt".  Although the Tilt would be in 3G mode all the time (no way that I knew of to turn that off).  That said, the Tilt was almost never used for any kind of browsing due to Pocket Internet Explorer being unable to render the majority of sites I’d browse while away from my desk, coupled with the fact that I had to reboot the bloody thing every day to keep the Internet connection working.

Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly capable of running my iPhone from full to dead in 5 hours if I am playing more intensive games, or constantly fiddling with something on it, but in normal use the figures in the screen are typical.

There is certainly room for improvement here, since my battery life does drop a fair bit if I leave the phone in 3G mode and more so if I have "Push" e-mail enabled.  There are times I do like to have "Push" e-mail enabled, but it is very rare I need to respond to anything in my inbox faster than 15 minutes.  I appreciate for some people that is not the case, but it works for me.

With everything enabled I get closer to 18 hours total run-time under the same kind of usage as described above.  That’s enough (for me) given that it is no big issue to drop my phone in its dock or plug it in to the car if I need a bit more juice for the day.

I do think replaceable batteries would have been a good idea for the iPhone.  They would, of course, make it a little less smooth in appearance, and probably would have needed the part of the case to be part of the battery, the way Samsung phones like the BlackJack tend to be built, but I think in this case the aesthetic/size loss would be worth it.

The biggest problem, in my opinion, with iPhone battery life is less an actual issue and more one of perception.  Many people have come to the iPhone from other feature-phones or smart-phones in which all they did was make calls, send a few texts and maybe read their e-mail.  Most of the day the phone sat in a pocket or on a hip with its screen off, its radio in lower-power "search" mode, doing nothing.

That’s a much less intensive usage cycle than what seems to be typical of iPhone users, who are often running with the device fully powered up, using the big screen, the radio in 3G data mode, with the CPU churning on something heavy.

If you’re getting much less in the way of battery life than this, and certainly if I was, I’d be wondering about the thing myself.  I am just aware of how much I use the iPhone interactively compared to my old phones, and it compares very well in that regard.  In apples-to-apples comparisons I’ve not seen a problem yet.

Hopefully a future revision of the O.S. will allow for automatically switching 3G and location services on and off as needed, and also provide configurable profiles making it possible to switch your power-settings around with just one or two taps … instead of one or two taps per option.

In the mean time though, I still suspect the people with serious issues either have defective devices or are not being realistic in how they use the iPhone and the phone they are comparing it to.