3GS - incredibly poor battery life
I've had each generation of iPhone since they were launched in 2007, and upgraded from my 3G to the new 3GS a week ago on the day of its release. My experience with the battery life has been really, really poor. So bad that I sought out this forum yesterday and decided to run the battery down to zero just to see how poor its life was.
Here's what happened:
Yesterday I kept it plugged in and charged at 100% until 6 PM. I used it for ~2 hours of reading using the Kindle app and quick view of 1-2 web pages. This morning I woke up and read the news using a news reader app for ~1 hour before it turned itself off when it reached 1%.
Stats were 3 HOURS and 7 MINUTES of usage to drain the battery to ZERO. That was without calls, without video, without iPod use.
When I'm using it I can literally watch the power meter (which I've turned on the numeric percentage readout for) drain about 1% when I actually take any action on the device. I feel offended and mislead by Apple because the 3GS was supposed to have improved battery life. My netbook has better battery life (6 hours with extended battery while running its built in 3g mobile broadband service the whole time), and that's a full computer.
If you've had similar issues I'd like to hear about them and would certainly welcome any solutions that don't involve tweaking so many settings that the device doesn't work in it's default mode.
I'm recharging from the zero mark now. If the same cycle happens after another charge I feel like I'll have to return it to Apple after wasting a lot of time and simply move back to my 3G.
Given the amount of traffic on the forums about this issue, I think Apple had better speak up or they are going to experience a lot of damage to their brand.
Here's what happened:
Yesterday I kept it plugged in and charged at 100% until 6 PM. I used it for ~2 hours of reading using the Kindle app and quick view of 1-2 web pages. This morning I woke up and read the news using a news reader app for ~1 hour before it turned itself off when it reached 1%.
Stats were 3 HOURS and 7 MINUTES of usage to drain the battery to ZERO. That was without calls, without video, without iPod use.
When I'm using it I can literally watch the power meter (which I've turned on the numeric percentage readout for) drain about 1% when I actually take any action on the device. I feel offended and mislead by Apple because the 3GS was supposed to have improved battery life. My netbook has better battery life (6 hours with extended battery while running its built in 3g mobile broadband service the whole time), and that's a full computer.
If you've had similar issues I'd like to hear about them and would certainly welcome any solutions that don't involve tweaking so many settings that the device doesn't work in it's default mode.
I'm recharging from the zero mark now. If the same cycle happens after another charge I feel like I'll have to return it to Apple after wasting a lot of time and simply move back to my 3G.
Given the amount of traffic on the forums about this issue, I think Apple had better speak up or they are going to experience a lot of damage to their brand.
iPhone 3GS, iPhone OS 3.0
