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.

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I have completed the setup of the first two systems, specifically my primary Vista x64 instance and the OS X build.  Rather than taking my existing configurations for these systems, I started from scratch with bare drives.

This was partly out of a desire to keep things pure, and also because my primary Vista installation was something I did nearly 18 months ago and much of what was involved there has been forgotten and/or has changed.

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As a professional software engineer/architect I make frequent use of all three of today’s primary PC operating systems – Windows, OS X and Linux on a regular basis.

To this point, each of them has fulfilled a specific role, or been required for a particular purpose.  And, while I do categorize and view them differently, I have no religious preference for any of them.

They are facilitators, environments, for running other software and tools which I use in both my personal and professional life.

For a good while now I have been wondering just how well each might fulfill the role of my primary desktop operating system.

I do not, necessarily, believe there is one single environment that can meet all of the needs I currently have of my primary desktop, but I am interested in finding out which might be the most generally applicable and, perhaps, most pleasurable to work with.

I spend a great deal of time working at my computer, so if there are things I can do that make the experience either more productive, or more enjoyable, then they are worth evaluating in a frank and honest manner.

That is the purpose of this experiment; to spend a week each with Windows, OS X and Linux as my primary desktop operating system and see how well each works and what is good and bad about my experiences with each.

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Pac-Man is an indisputably classic game, and one of my absolute favorite video games of all time.  From the perspective of classic retro-games, probably my all-time favorite.  It is certainly the one I’ve played the most.

Whether it was frantically pumping quarters (or 10P pieces from what was my part of the world back then) into the old coin-operated machines, or gladly buying it in some Namco "museum" collection or other for almost every console it has ever released on, I’ve probably spent more to play it than any other classic game as well.

For the first time since Pac-Man has appeared on consoles I am finding myself highly-resistant to buying it.  Not because I don’t want it … but because I don’t understand why a game that is $4.99 for the iPod Classic should cost $9.99 on the iPhone, when the game, control excepted, is the same.

Actually, I understand it just fine and technically it isn’t Pac-Man that has gone insane, it is Namco.  The two games are right there in the iTunes store, easily compared to each other – and beyond adding accelerometer control (highly questionable at best for a precision-control game like this, and definitely not something I feel is worth $5) it is the same game just ported!

It’s the same story for Ms. Pac-Man and Pole Position Remix.  A penny over double the price just because it is on the iPhone rather than the iPod?!  What’s the extra value here … other than to Namco’s shareholders that is?  It just seems schizophrenic and rather silly to me.  Especially when you consider how profitable Pac-Man has been for Namco over the years.

When the same game is available on the Xbox 360 for ~$5, and given the certification process and similar distribution fee for Xbox Live Arcade titles, and the addition of achievements and online leader-boards, $10 for the game on the iPhone just seems unnecessarily exploitative.

I find it very hard to believe, particularly in light of the consistent price feedback on the Application Store, that Namco wouldn’t make a lot more money by lowering the price and increasing their sales volume. 

There are copious examples of much smaller developers doing just this, much to the, quite vocal, delight of their new found customers.

But what is one to do?

Say "sod that", that’s what … if Namco does get a bleedin’ clue and those games do drop to $4.99 I’ll buy them on the iPhone in a heartbeat … but I am not paying double for the same thing as exists on other, more involved, platforms just because it is on the shiny new iPhone.

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.

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