Ardent Meridian

I wrote last year about the battery life of the iPhone 3G, following on from lots of forum chat about perceived issues with it.  At the time I maintained those issues were down to people playing with their phones more as they were new and/or that those people were new to Smart Phones and simply had unrealistic expectations.

Well, the new iPhone 3GS is available, along with claims of improved battery life compared to the 3G and, of course, the ‘net is full of people complaining about battery life – when the numbers they are posting are very much in line with Apple’s claims.

So I thought it my be interesting to repeat the same kind of thing I did with my 3G and compare it with the new 3GS.

The image to the left here shows the results of me charging the phone to full and then using it as I normally would in the course of a day.

It is worth noting the odd “Lifetime” call time value – which would be pretty hard to get to on a 5 day old phone.  This number came across from a backup when I restored my 3GS after activating it. It is stranger still because that was not the number in that field on the old phone.  Otherwise all the numbers displayed are taken after a reset of statistics and then running from a full charge down to the 10% battery warning.

During the capture period my usage was as follows, and is largely typical for me:

• Calls: A little over an hour throughout the day
• Gaming: Real Racing (~30 minutes), Yahtzee (~20 minutes) and Archon (~20 minutes)
• Internet: Browsing, Twitter, Facebook and perusing the App Store, ~1.5 hours total
• Camera/Video: Took 8 pictures, ~2 minutes of video recording.
• iPod Video: ~44 minutes watching 2 TV episodes
• iPod Audio: ~2 hours, played over a combination of wired and Bluetooth headphones
• Other: ~10 minutes playing with MotionX GPS and the built in Maps application.

So that is shade over a day in standby mode, and almost 7 full hours interactive use.  That is pretty good by current Smart Phone standards, is more than enough to get me through a full day without needing to stop and charge, and is certainly at or above the specification Apple claims.

Now, if you looked at the numbers I got last year for the iPhone 3G, as shown to right here, it seems like the 3G does better (it is worth nothing that I had not reset statistics for this picture at the time).

What is actually different, quite dramatically so, are the settings that were used then on the 3G test and what I used today for the 3GS test.

On the 3G I was selectively enabling and disabling features throughout the course of the day.  For the 3GS tests I had every feature of the phone enabled, along with the screen set to a much higher brightness.

This is pretty surprising, especially given that the 3GS runs significantly faster than the 3G, which typically results in higher power drain.  But to put it properly in perspective the table below shows what was constantly enabled on the 3GS and only selectively enabled (or completely disabled) on the 3G phone last year:

Given that 3G and Push Email are considered to be two of the more battery-intensive features on both phones, and that the 3GS had both of these enabled, along with running two additional features that the 3G phone did not have, and the higher screen brightness on the 3GS it is fairly clear to me that the 3GS does in deed offer better battery life.

It will be interesting to see what a true apples-to-apples comparison would yield.  For the purposes of this test however I wanted to stick to my current usage patterns (which have changed since I wrote the 3G battery life piece).  And that pattern is to leave everything ON as I got tired of managing the battery on the old phone.

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