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Are You Happy With the 3G Battery Life?

Posted July 13, 2008 7:34 AM by Gregory Ng
Categories: Poll 

After 48 hours with my 3G iPhone I must say that I noticed a huge difference in battery life compared to the first gen iPhone I have been using for the past year.

I was on a plane for most of the day yesterday and had my iPhone off for about 8 of the 18 hours I was awake. Before my flight, during my layover, and after I landed I had my iPhone on and checking email, surfing the web, and downloading a few applications. This brought my battery down to almost nothing by the time I went to bed. Needless t say this may be interesting when I have my iPhone on all day.

What has your experience been with the battery life of your new 3G iPhone? And has it met your expectations before buying? Take our poll below.

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Comments

  1. Mine seemed WAY miscalibrated when I got it, so that may be your problem.  The first day, it drained to nothing in an hour.  I charged it until the batter icon looked full, and it died again two or three hours later.  Charged it before bed, and it was dead by morning, just from being on standby.

    I then left it on the charger for about five hours after that full discharge…way past when the icon switched over to being a ‘plug’, and it seems to have fixed the problem.

    Posted by Patrick Austin on July 13, 2008 7:56 AM

  2. Patrick that is an interesting point. Not sure if the iphone’s battery had to be seasoned or not. To be honest I havent even opened up the directions booklet to check.

    Posted by Gregory Ng on July 13, 2008 8:16 AM

  3. I complained of the new iPhone’s battery life on another site and quickly got a half dozen reminders that all new rechargeable lithium batteries need a few deep cycle conditionings to really get their full life potential.

    I recall the first weekend with my original 8gb iPhone being so disappointed with the battery life, but it got better over a few weeks, so I’m with the crowd saying you need to let the battery go completely dead, then charge for a good 12 hours a few times before complaining.

    Also, I’m sure we’re all putting maximum demand on our shiny new toys, testing out the new features, watching the blue GPS dot track us as we drive around, drooling over the new 3g internet speeds. Once the novelty wears off and we settle into a more normal usage pattern, the battery life will be less noticeably lacking.

    I don’t know if they recommend it for iPhones, but Apple recommends periodic deep cycle discharge/charge for it’s laptop batteries.

    All that said, though, I learned with the first generation iPhone that you were best keeping it on a car charger when driving, and it didn’t hurt to have an extra charger in the office, especially if I was using Safari a lot. 

    The Mophie Juicepack, when it finally was released, was a real blessing. I hope Mophie doesn’t take 9 months to come out with one that fits the iPhone 3g like they did the original model, and damn Apple for changing the form factor enough on the new phone to make all my old accessories useless. wink

    Users new to the iPhone, or smartphone’s in general need to understand that those big bright screens and little mobile computers (iPhone’s aren’t phones, they are handheld computers) take a lot more juice than the little clamshell phones they’ve had.  My friend goes days without charging his little Samsung clamshell phone, but when he finally goes to an iPhone in August, he’ll have to learn quickly that nightly charging is required.

    (this is a repost of an article at my personal blog http://thedigitaldive.net/blog/ )

    Posted by DistortedLoop on July 13, 2008 8:40 AM

  4. I can’t really speak to the 3G iPhone, but I’ll definitely say that on my older iPhone full was not always full.  That is to say, sometimes the battery meter would look full based on the icon, but then it would die pretty fast.  However, once I got in the habit of letting it charge overnight, I found it did a lot better.  Maybe the 3G iPhone has similar issues, i.e. what Patrick above said.

    Posted by Marcos on July 13, 2008 9:01 AM

  5. This may not be a 3G problem entirely.  I’ve upgraded my 1st gen phone to 2.0 and my battery life is about half of what it was before.  It has also made the phone extremely sluggish and reception has suffered as well.

    Posted by Ian on July 13, 2008 8:07 PM

  6. It was such a bummer to find the 1st gen. couldn’t sync with the Pioneer car stereo I had installed with an ipod module usb input bluetooth the works ! No streaming music or video . No video even when docked ! Wouldn’t sync phone book . No album art . at least i could play my music and charge through the stereo when it was docked . What’s improved with the new 2nd Gen. ? Nothing ! In fact now it wont charge from my dock so if i use it in the car I wont have enough juice for the day Brilliant !

    Posted by byronchurch on July 14, 2008 12:53 AM

  7. whine whine whine battery life whine whine whine!!!! boo f’n hoo, do some research before you buy, 3G eats battery life big surprise.

    Posted by Joe on July 14, 2008 7:51 AM

  8. Joe-  Thanks for your input, very productive and helpful.

    Posted by DistortedLoop on July 14, 2008 8:00 AM

  9. Hey all, one of the big things you need to watch out for is the fetch new data settings.  I had a problem with my laptop wanting to resync everything with the new .me account.  This in turn wanted to “Push” a ton of data to the phone.  Be really careful with that one.

    Posted by big john on July 14, 2008 7:24 PM

  10. Sure the battery on iPhone 3G is not that great, but what can we do? We want small size phones, powerful features and lengthy battery life.

    Just get a backup battery. I got mine from iPhoneck brands. Their new 3G backup battery is probably one of the better looking products in the market. Their website is www.iphoneck.com

    Posted by coco on July 17, 2008 9:38 PM

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