Returning The iPhone After Two Weeks Of Daily Use | Hacker News Reader

Returning The iPhone After Two Weeks Of Daily Use

washingtonpost.com

19 pointsrami13 comments

I'm not sure I agree with him. I have an iPhone 3G. My boyfriend is a die hard anti-Apple fanboy (sigh, us two are complete opposites) and has a samsung blackjack II and is tempted to get a blackberry bold when released. One of his coworkers has an n95 he loves to death.

All three of us have pretty pathetic battery life on 3g.

My iPhone only dies faster than their two phones because they won't stop playing crash bandicoot, dizzy bee, tap tap revenge, and de blob on my phone. Meanwhile there's really nothing interesting to do on their phones besides snoop on their emails and the games that exist for windows mobile etc. aren't really...as fun. That is all.

(Also, the above would correspond with my opinion and experience that all 3G smartphones have awful battery life anyway, so if that's the only reason why he switched then that's not much of one.

He says he mostly does email and voice calls though. I don't know where he lives that his calls are dropped and he gets little to no signal, but my iPhone gets comparable signal to the two other smartphones and I've never had a dropped call (except when I was a couple floors underground). I will admit I almost never actually call anyone on my phone though; total talk time in 1 year and 1 month is around 1 day 6 hours. But I do lots of email! And it's a perfectly fine device for that. Just those blasted games that everyone wants to play...)

His main (and only) issue with the iPhone seems to be battery life. Interestingly, tests have shown that the iPhone's battery life is about on par (somewhat better, in fact, see links at the end) than other 3G phones' battery lives. However, people are using the iPhone way more than other phones, so the limited battery life is more noticeable.

So he basically returned the iPhone because he liked it so much that he used it way more than any other phone he's owned.

Simple solution: Turn off 3G when you don't need it.

iPhone 3G battery life comparisons:

http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3353

http://gizmodo.com/5024804/iphone-3g-battery-life-beats-the-...

The other issue present on the iPhone and not on most other smartphones is the lack of a removable battery. I suspect battery packs and power-related accessories are going to be pretty popular with the 3G iPhone.

I don't particularly agree with him, either.

If you're doing sensible things, like turning off push e-mail when you're in the office, not keeping 3G on when you're in patchy coverage, etc. it should last you the day. I live in London, where there's 3G signal _everywhere_, which helps a bit.

We really need a developer to step up and design an iPhone app that would let you save and easily switch "states" that could flip all of the various power-management affecting settings at once. (3G, push, GPS, WiFi, etc.) Someone who does this could easily sell it to virtually every iPhone owner.

it's not user friendly, and from what I know it's impossible to have applications working in the background so the app would be useless.

i can't imagine what would happen if Nokia expected every user out there to swtich states on their own! Fail, that what would happen. It's not a laptop...it shouldn't behave like one.

N95 had also some battery problems and were fixed with a later update. If there are indeed any problems, Probably Apple will fix them too.

I love the application idea but it'll only be possible on jailbroken phones because Apple doesn't allow direct access to the system preferences (the entire SCPreferences etc. is undocumented by Apple) and I expect that trying to accessing them would get your app. booted from the App Store.

Why do you consider "turning off push e-mail" and "not keeping 3G on when you're in patchy coverage" sensible? Push email shouldn't be much more expensive in terms of battery life than SMS. The phone should know enough about what you need to turn 3G on or off automatically.

Absolutely agree. The idea that the user is responsible for diddling around with complicated settings in order to get an essential feature* to work flies directly in the face of the way Apple products are supposed to work. I don't have one: is it really that bad? That's a showstopper for a huge number of users if true.

* And yeah, I'd put "24+ hours of battery life" way up there on the list of essential features for any device that goes in a pocket.

"... The iPhone 3G is not for me. I've returned mine exactly two weeks after I committed a Friday and Saturday morning to buy one. ... to browse the internet and use those cool applications, but as a phone and communications device the iPhone leaves me wanting more ..."

Interesting opinion especially after listening to Dave Winer talking about how he develops on the highest end hardware he can get his hands on because the magic time to create a useful app in his opinion is approx. 3 years. At that time the rest of the users catch up and you magically have an application/service ready built ~ http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/whyIdInvestInIphoneApps.mp... [20Mb, 10:25Min] The parent article can be found here ~ http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/07/26/listeningRespect...

Wow It bugs me when people don't really understand technology and development. Especially journalist, they just leave a bad taste and lead people in the wrong direction.

Those who are familiar with the iPhone software 2.0, Its is buggy to say the least, and people I know who are testing the 2.1 are pleased with it. Apparently the battery life is improved. Like most of you I agree, turn of the features you are not using. You really don't need wifi and 3G on at all times, I know its counter intuitive but its a developing technology and it will improve over time (battery life).

Although I am a bit miffed that Apple did not do enough testing and QA on the 2.0 software before launching, I have no doubts that they will fix it.

Releasing a 3G version with an even more severe version of the 2Gs battery issues made much worse product.

The weird thing is, Nokia can do 3G and Webkit on the N95 and N96 with these probs.

So... If he's returning his I'll take it. We've been sold out here in SF for 2 weeks.

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