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Improving battery life?

D

dulaney22

macrumors regular
Original poster
I'm new to the boards and Apple in general. Got the new iPhone a few weeks ago and an iMac last week. Love them both.

Anyway, being ignorant, just wondering how a software update can improve battery life. Would someone kindly explain in layman terms?
 
dulaney22 said:
I'm new to the boards and Apple in general. Got the new iPhone a few weeks ago and an iMac last week. Love them both.

Anyway, being ignorant, just wondering how a software update can improve battery life. Would someone kindly explain in layman terms?
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They could make tweaks to the code that affect things like how quickly the processor goes into idle mode or in just improving their code to be more efficient so that it requires less processor utilization. They could make code changes that change how the wireless works. I could go on and on.....but I truly have no idea what they have done....but there are many angles they could have taken.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G (16GB, 2.0.2 JB'd): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)

deimos256 said:
they greatly improved battery life by not including push notifications in the update hahaa
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Yeah, and the iPhone will now kick down to Airplane Mode after two minutes of inactivity.
 
mavis said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G (16GB, 2.0.2 JB'd): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)



Yeah, and the iPhone will now kick down to Airplane Mode after two minutes of inactivity.
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That or the default screen dim time will be changed from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
 
Well, early on some folks (including me) speculated that the battery issues could be due to a problem with the iPhone not being calibrated correctly to the battery. What this means is that, possibly, the phone is not gauging the power levels correctly and is fooled into thinking the battery power level is lower than it actually is. This theory is somewhat supported by the fact that people with a V1 iPhone, previous to 2.0, had no issues but then experienced much worse battery life after the update.

There may be other factors such as some function in the phone using power without the user being aware.

I am cautiously optimistic...
 
when i use my 3g phone on edge as in i toggle off the 3g, it lasts "i feel" longer than my 1st gen iphone, did, but maybe im not using it as much as i used my 1st gen the days the battery died faster.
 
I don't know much details about the battery-related firmware coding, but it can easily be explained by the word "efficiency"

So, they somehow improved the efficiency of some algorithms that are related to the consumption rate of the battery. However, I really hope this will not affect the overall performance of the device. It sounds a little too good to be true, but we'll see.
 
I hope it is significant. I've been leaving 3g off for weeks, it's the only way my phone makes it through the workday without a mid-day charging pit stop, even with extremely limited use. Edge only and it goes and goes.
 
They could make a code that just makes the battery indicator appear to drain slower. Combine that with peoples imaginations and you have a good solution. Who would even know unless they drained it completely dead all the time?
 
Maybe it will automatically turn off location services when it isn't in use by an app, something that they should've done originally. I seem to remember Steve saying "significantly better battery life for some people", but maybe I'm remembering incorrectly.
 
joekun said:
Maybe it will automatically turn off location services when it isn't in use by an app, something that they should've done originally. I seem to remember Steve saying "significantly better battery life for some people", but maybe I'm remembering incorrectly.
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yea. 'some people'

i wonder what that means.
 
michael31986 said:
i wondered this too. it just is weird how firmware can make battery last longer.
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For example: I'm a programmer, and I just tweaked some of my code, changed 3 lines, which cut out redundant updates and shortened the time it took for something to run from 2 seconds to 0.07 seconds. If you wonder why the heck I'm messing with this, consider that if I run 9999 transactions (which most of my customers can easily do in one day), it only takes 12 minutes to process 😀 them now, versus 5 1/2 hours! 😱 😡

Same way with the iPhone - for example, if the phone is on Edge, and pings for a 3G tower (which uses a lot of power I understand), they could reduce the frequency of how often it's looking. I don't know exactly what they've done, just trying to give you an example. Hope this helps...
 
I wonder if it might be something I was hoping for where the phone would just stay in EDGE mode until I'm trying to use data and wifi isn't available. Then, it would enable 3G for the speed boost. Once I am done using the data, shutdown the 3G and drop back to EDGE after a timeout has expired. I currently do this manually. I only enable 3G when I need faster data and wifi isn't available.
 
lakaiordie said:
yea. 'some people'

i wonder what that means.
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It means they made some things more efficient (3G? GPS? Just guessing...) but if you already have these things turned off, the update won't be able to give you more life than you're currently getting!

So the "some people" are the people who use everything. The people who aren't using features aren't going to get better since they've already eliminated the drain from those items.
 
Small White Car said:
It means they made some things more efficient (3G? GPS? Just guessing...) but if you already have these things turned off, the update won't be able to give you more life than you're currently getting!

So the "some people" are the people who use everything. The people who aren't using features aren't going to get better since they've already eliminated the drain from those items.
Click to expand...

I'm worried that you're right...I keep loc svcs off, I'm in a good 3G area, and use wifi at home...not hopeful that my battery life will improve.
 
with all of the crashing going on with the current firmware , it's possible that some application processes are still running after a crash - consuming cpu cycles and therefore battery.
 
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