Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How is your battery life

  • Brilliant

    Votes: 15 10.1%
  • Same as Iphone 2G

    Votes: 23 15.4%
  • Ok

    Votes: 60 40.3%
  • Poor

    Votes: 51 34.2%

  • Total voters
    149
  • Poll closed .

Ori

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 18, 2008
347
2
Ok,
So first day with Iphone and I haven't used it very much and the battery is down to 50%.
How are you finding it?

I have 3G on and I have location services on. Isn't it only using them when I open apps?

Experiences please.
 
3G disabled, only on when I need it. Wifi on.

Did a quick test and it took about 5 hours to deplete the battery from about 75% when playing music with the iphone's speaker.
 
been using 3G and safari plus listening to music at the same time, just about 4 hours :(
 
It's a lot for a little device to do. The more they add the more they REALLY need to add a replaceable battery.
 
Thing is, on my old iphone I used to have Wifi on and browse at my lunch break at work. Use the phone a little bit and listed to music and it lasted quite easily 1.5 days.

Less usage now with 3g, GPS, and wifi and I get a lot less. It's not like I am using them all, but they are on when the phone is on standby.

Wierd.
 
this battery life issue is the only thing that is holding me back from upgrading..if it is the same as the iPhone 2G, then I think I will stick with my current phone.
 
I've really noticed that some apps are killing it esp. games. Is it similar with the apps on the 2G? I would assume so.
 
I wanna start off by sayng I love this phone and it does everything I need. However my battery life has been god awful with 3G on. Without it on, it's great but I bought it for 3G. Took it out of charger at about 11am and I am already down to about 20% at 3 pm. Bad bad performance and I'm so dissapponted!
 
Battery life is ok, just expected it to be a bit better. Charged it to 100% yesterday at about 10am. Only took about 3-4 calls...surfed only for about 10 minutes to show others. This morning I spent about 3 hours inputting data into a app that I downloaded and the battery just drained. Had to recharge.
 
I wanna start off by sayng I love this phone and it does everything I need. However my battery life has been god awful with 3G on. Without it on, it's great but I bought it for 3G. Took it out of charger at about 11am and I am already down to about 20% at 3 pm. Bad bad performance and I'm so dissapponted!

One option is to turn 3G off except when you need it. Depend on wifi for smaller web pages and 2G for phone calls. Then turn 3G on only when you want to do some heavy duty browsing and aren't near a wifi access point.
 
Left the house at 5 am this morning....received very few text messages...used 3G for just over 30 min downloaded some apps and tested some out....made about 4 phone calls...and got back at 3 pm...battery is almost gone...

I gotta figure out a way to preserve it...3G is being turned off!
 
So far for me it's not bad. I did a bit of browsing today, a bit of texting, and listened to Pandora radio for about 45 minutes and the battery is at about 90% for me... so it's really not all that bad.
 
About 4 hours of life if continuously using 3G. I wish there was a short-cut to manually disable/enable 3G!!
 
I just got back from my local Apple store looking at accessories. I used my iPhone 3G for directions, made a call to my local AT&T store, a call to Best Buy, and my sister. None of these calls were very long, a couple minutes. I had 3G on. I was gone about 3 hours, 4 tops and my battery looks very low, to the point I'm expecting the 20% warning to come up at any time. So I'm very disappointed with the battery. I'm glad I don't use my cell phone much for actual calls. Sorry Apple, but I don't understand why you don't give us a replaceable battery. I can understand on iPods but on a cell phone?!! I don't see them becoming a true power player with business customers without a replaceable battery.
 
Well it seems Apple knew all along that 3G would kill the battery. Hence the first iPhone not having it. You can't say they didn't warn us...

I'm running out of battery before the end of the day (With 3G on). Battery life is not something I was too concerned about but if my phone can't even make it through the day its a major issue.

Just hoping I will calm down on how much I use it once the novelty wears off a little. I don't want to have to turn 3G off but I think I might have to.
 
I'm showing 2h56 usage, 21h53 standby and it's half-full. The usage has been about half an hour of YouTube, half an hour of Safari, 15 minutes of Maps with GPS, 15 minutes of calls, half an hour of Super Monkey Ball...and probably the rest browsing the app store, sending the odd text/email, messing with the settings, etc.

Anyway, after all that, it's showing about half-full...about the same as my 'old' one.
 
If you use common sense, you can save your battery...

Using Edge for just runnin around and not using all the services like location, wifi, and 3g, and dimming your screen, it has worked fine for me...

Not great... but most of the time I am around a power source so I don't have much to worry about... I keep an old backup phone charged up in my car and a paperclip if I run into a problem, just swap out the sim.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

Hopefully this will help some people.. :) Am I thrilled with the battery usage, no, am I thrilled with what my first Iphone has the ability to do for me... Hell Yeah !!

Being able to have a spare battery and throw it in there - now that would be priceless...
 
Well it seems Apple knew all along that 3G would kill the battery. Hence the first iPhone not having it. You can't say they didn't warn us...

I'm running out of battery before the end of the day (With 3G on). Battery life is not something I was too concerned about but if my phone can't even make it through the day its a major issue.

Just hoping I will calm down on how much I use it once the novelty wears off a little. I don't want to have to turn 3G off but I think I might have to.

Wait one minute here!!!! That sounds awful performance!!! 3g is supposed to have 5 hours talk time!!! unless you were on the phone for 3 hours and browsed the web for an hour you should still have loads of battery life!!! I mean 80% at least if not more!

Why should you cut down your mild usage to even less!!!?????

Anyone tried turning off location services to see if it makes a difference?
 
just remembered something. My old iphone required a few charge cycles before it actually had good usable life. I'm hoping the same is true of the new one.
 
so keep in mind that when you have a low 3g signal. and it doesn't switch to edge, the circuit will try to increase the signal.

just be wise when you use 3g
 
so keep in mind that when you have a low 3g signal. and it doesn't switch to edge, the circuit will try to increase the signal.

just be wise when you use 3g

Oh for crying out loud.....the battery life people are experiencing here is just ridiculous though.

I know 3G is tough of battery, but SJ said 5 hours talk time 3G and 10 hours talk time on 2G. This seems to be a myth. Yes you may get that in full service with wifi off, location services off and screen brightness set to min. If you don't do all of this you will get 1 hour before your battery beeps at you.

Not good.
 
Oh for crying out loud.....the battery life people are experiencing here is just ridiculous though.

I know 3G is tough of battery, but SJ said 5 hours talk time 3G and 10 hours talk time on 2G. This seems to be a myth. Yes you may get that in full service with wifi off, location services off and screen brightness set to min. If you don't do all of this you will get 1 hour before your battery beeps at you.

Not good.

You're basing this on the experience of a very small number of people on the first day of use. My experience (noted above) isn't in line with what others have experienced - maybe my charging cycle was better, maybe I'm simply being less sensationalist, maybe it's just luck. But don't go all tabloid and acting like you're going to throw yourself off a bridge over battery life just yet.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.