I've never been one to complain about smartphone battery life - especially the iPhone since ultimately - if it gets be through the day, I'm good. I don't care if I plug in at night if I'm at 80 percent or 3 percent.
And coming from the 3GS to the iPhone 4 - I did notice a slight improvement over battery life.
However - looking at a lot of usage reports (and a few people here in my office comparing during different times during the day) I did feel that my battery life wasn't as good as theirs. By afternoon - I might be down to 70 percent and they would still be as high as the mid to high 80s. A few into the low 90s. And most of our shared usage was the same - and most of the time the phone was "idle" on our desks.
I tried reboots/reset network settings, deleting apps & mail accounts/etc
So what was the difference? Silly really. I have 3 email accounts. One is via Gmail and is on push. That's my primary account and gets probably about 100-200 messages a day. I have a legacy AOL account and also a POP account from a website I maintain. The POP account gets lots of spam. The AOL account barely gets anything either way. Both these accounts were set to fetch every 15 minutes.
Like some of my colleagues. I switched my fetch to every hour.
For the past two days - my iPhone 4 battery has transformed. Sincerely. It's currently 1:40pm (been unplugged since 7am) and my % is 92%. Normally around this time - like I said - I would be in the late 70s.
That's SIGNIFICANT. And while I understand "why" - I have to say that I am a bit surprised that logging into two email accounts a couple of more times an hour uses THAT much battery. Approximately 20% for 18 additional "fetch's" for each account. That's roughly "using" 1% for each fetch.
So either AOL or my POP is dragging and causing more workload - or something else. Don't know. Don't really care.
Sorry for the long post. But in short, and it may seem obvious, but if you think you're battery is draining more than it should. It might not be multitasking. Or a bad app. Or many things. It might be something very simple like changing your fetch to hourly or manually.
And coming from the 3GS to the iPhone 4 - I did notice a slight improvement over battery life.
However - looking at a lot of usage reports (and a few people here in my office comparing during different times during the day) I did feel that my battery life wasn't as good as theirs. By afternoon - I might be down to 70 percent and they would still be as high as the mid to high 80s. A few into the low 90s. And most of our shared usage was the same - and most of the time the phone was "idle" on our desks.
I tried reboots/reset network settings, deleting apps & mail accounts/etc
So what was the difference? Silly really. I have 3 email accounts. One is via Gmail and is on push. That's my primary account and gets probably about 100-200 messages a day. I have a legacy AOL account and also a POP account from a website I maintain. The POP account gets lots of spam. The AOL account barely gets anything either way. Both these accounts were set to fetch every 15 minutes.
Like some of my colleagues. I switched my fetch to every hour.
For the past two days - my iPhone 4 battery has transformed. Sincerely. It's currently 1:40pm (been unplugged since 7am) and my % is 92%. Normally around this time - like I said - I would be in the late 70s.
That's SIGNIFICANT. And while I understand "why" - I have to say that I am a bit surprised that logging into two email accounts a couple of more times an hour uses THAT much battery. Approximately 20% for 18 additional "fetch's" for each account. That's roughly "using" 1% for each fetch.
So either AOL or my POP is dragging and causing more workload - or something else. Don't know. Don't really care.
Sorry for the long post. But in short, and it may seem obvious, but if you think you're battery is draining more than it should. It might not be multitasking. Or a bad app. Or many things. It might be something very simple like changing your fetch to hourly or manually.
