darobman wrote:
I find it interesting that the number of new posts on this topic is dwindling.
[...]
I have two push accounts and I can easily end the day with 70% battery life. Overnight, I usually see a drop of 4%.
I also want to mention for what it's worth [...]
Well, that is to be expected. It's the Holiday season, people are out shopping/closing the year/student - exams etc. This was overall very poorly managed in terms of support - some individual efforts have to be commended, many people trying to help. The issue existed and still exists, as evidenced locally by this group of European users - a carrier specific or a batch hardware related problem maybe - but many of the root causes are being ironed out simply because of the nature of things - time passes and apps are updated, and carriers do things we'll never know, and charge cycles go on, and sanity ends up prevailing randomly, things get burned in, the cloud is being tweaked - maybe the data on it sanitized differently since the problem began etc.
First there was a lack of education about the usage spec itself, and even the concept of "usage" remains somewhat misunderstood amongst users. Even though the call/internet spec was slightly better than the "4", the standby time spec of the 4s should have clued people that this was a more energy hungry/feature packed phone with the same battery. Yet it was marketed as a huge improvement while the active internet usage trend skyrocketed. This was all compounded with some users' restores lacking sanity and also app bugging under iOS5 - I think 3dmac explained it quite well. Secondly, best practices for the phone owner are not well known i.e. charge cycles, reset, mail fetch, killing apps - it takes more than a obscure web page to make users knowledgeable about this. Those battery documents must be present on the phone and must pop-up upon first use. Thirdly there was a poor choice of factory settings i.e. aggressive... I mean automated timezone and tons of automation. I mean come on, a bit of "feature economy" would have helped - the user can select his city even with the most minimal of intelligence. Even some technology choice made by Apple complicated the issue, i.e. the absence of 3G toggle, the incapacity to properly police network access of apps i.e. individual settings. Fourthly, the forum is a terribly poor tool for managing relevant information and Apple didn't have what it takes to make a proper knowledge base document, to the point that someone like me, who doesn't own the phone and honestly doesn't like Apple very much, had to give it a shot. Thank me if the number of posts are dwindling lolll. The sheer length of the threads become a disincentive in the end. Nobody wants to read that. Further, Apple Geniuses offered varying responses to support, there was no coherence - ok, they may be polite and nice but they needed a KB article too. Fifth, fanboys don't help - with unrealistic usage stats that create anxiety and anal-retentiveness within the user base i.e. if he can last that long, so should I. I mean, look at you, you state you go though a day with your phone and have 70% left, and 3dmac goes 2-3-4 days. But you always forget to properly qualify your usage. Well, you guys are the type of guys that use your phones to make 30mins of calls a day, check a bit of mail and one web page. I'm sorry but even with the best scenario, this is not a phone-little-computer-replacement-magic you bring to the cottage on the weekend and you entertain your friends with streaming youtube for 2 days and playing games and fetching 80+ mail a days and updating FB/Twitter at the same time on a single charge. Sorry but it is not. As a pretty lifestyle gadget with emergency to medium-low-rare usage it can last 2 days. Plus little samples of your family, your 3 friends, or a small business debugging 5 phones, well, for what it's worth it's simply worth nothing, fringing on the anecdote. No offence. I don't think that the problem was necessarily plaguing a huge percentage of the phones, but implementing some methodology in the support and having better tools would have made the posts "dwindle" a long time ago. This could have been toned down within 50 000 hits. It was just some order prevailing within chaos through inertia or gravity, sedimentation through time. You guys shouldn't delude yourself about what happened here. Many users' perception of the product could have been salvaged if this had been done differently... Instead I suspect many accepted to have less than they bargained for in relation to the marketing simply because they love Apple. They accepted a "smartphone with a restricted active feature set" concept. They deserved the whole shebang. Anyways...
Scarface.
Level 1
(86 points)
Jason L
Community Specialists
