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Original iPhone + v2.0 = Battery Drain?

C

CTK2651

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 8, 2007
43
0
Happy owner of the original iPhone since they were introduced and never had a bit of problem. My usage pattern is pretty stable and on the whole I'd get two days before having to recharge. Installed v2.0 and battery life drops to almost half what I was getting. My usage pattern hasn't changed.

Only difference in settings (that I know of) is "push". I'm a mac, oops, mobileme user and have "push" turned on for mail and calendar.

To date, I've ...
1. Completely drained and recharged my battery three days straight using wall outlet (up till now alway sync-ed and then charged connected to Mac),
2. Every morning (after charge) completely reboot (Home & On switch),

No change.

Tomorrow after overnight charge I'm going to turn off push and go back to fetch setting to see if that's the problem. Although I thought push lessen battery usage when compared to fetch.

Any thoughts or is anyone else seeing this?
 
In General are your usage and standby times the same? I keep hanging or something with push enabled on Mobile Me and when that happens my use time and standby are exactly the same and my battery drops fast.

At that point I disable push, reboot and it usually stops.
 
Good for 3G

Although I would imagine this is incredibly frustrating for you, I have to admit it is encouraging for us new 3G users. The fact that the exact same unit has considerably more battery drain as a result of the software update leads me to believe the battery issue is a software thing and not a hardware thing. I'm hoping it will be resolved with an update and that the 3G battery actually performs normally. I understand their are issues with 3G and all the other location based stuff but, even after turning off the location stuff, a phone that does not last the day with only minimal usage is not a usable phone. If I were on the road for work and talking on the phone a lot, my new iPhone would maybe last two hours in its current battery state. This obviously makes the iPhone useless. I really love the phone and would like to keep it. But the current battery issues are a huge concern.
 
mdkrebs11 said:
Although I would imagine this is incredibly frustrating for you, I have to admit it is encouraging for us new 3G users. The fact that the exact same unit has considerably more battery drain as a result of the software update leads me to believe the battery issue is a software thing and not a hardware thing. I'm hoping it will be resolved with an update and that the 3G battery actually performs normally. I understand their are issues with 3G and all the other location based stuff but, even after turning off the location stuff, a phone that does not last the day with only minimal usage is not a usable phone. If I were on the road for work and talking on the phone a lot, my new iPhone would maybe last two hours in its current battery state. This obviously makes the iPhone useless. I really love the phone and would like to keep it. But the current battery issues are a huge concern.
Click to expand...

I agree. There are several threads that address this but the consensus seems to be that this is a 2.0 issue rather than hardware. The original poster's experiences reinforce this theory. What I find interesting is that with my 3G phone set to mimic a 2G phone (GPS, 3G, Push, etc. all turned off) the battery life is actually worse than V1 iPhone. This contradicts what Apple has advertised and told me over the phone. In fact, my battery life is about what I expected with 3G turned ON. Which makes me wonder if something in the software is not shutting down the radio (even though it shows EDGE).

I am growing cautiously optimistic that this can be fixed with an update.
 
CTK2651 said:
Happy owner of the original iPhone since they were introduced and never had a bit of problem. My usage pattern is pretty stable and on the whole I'd get two days before having to recharge. Installed v2.0 and battery life drops to almost half what I was getting. My usage pattern hasn't changed.

Only difference in settings (that I know of) is "push". I'm a mac, oops, mobileme user and have "push" turned on for mail and calendar.

To date, I've ...
1. Completely drained and recharged my battery three days straight using wall outlet (up till now alway sync-ed and then charged connected to Mac),
2. Every morning (after charge) completely reboot (Home & On switch),

No change.

Tomorrow after overnight charge I'm going to turn off push and go back to fetch setting to see if that's the problem. Although I thought push lessen battery usage when compared to fetch.

Any thoughts or is anyone else seeing this?
Click to expand...


I am also a current 1st gen iPhone user. I loaded the pre-released version of the 2.0 software. Originally I was seeing a slight drop off in battery life. However, once I turned off "Location Services" I noticed I was right back to my 1 1/2 - 2 day battery cycle. It seems as though the new locate me feature constantly tracks your position. I may be wrong but this seems like it would suck more battery life. Anyway, it helped me to leave "Location Services" off.
 
To the OP:
Did you grab v2.0 the night before and do a manual restore, or did you do a normal upgrade?

I grabbed 2.0 from download and did a manual restore...the next several days I experienced horrible battery life. I've since performed a regular restore so that iTunes grabs the file directly from Apple and I'm happy to report that my battery life is better...almost back to normal - I can't say that I'm completely back to normal because I have noticed slightly faster battery drain, and I'm not sure if that's because of more usage or possible program leaks.

I don't know if this is good news or bad news for 3G owners - it's possible that the file I grabbed was an earlier version of the 2.0 software (the one probably shipping w/ the 3G phones). If this is the case, a simple restore should do the problem to get the "newer" version. However, I don't think that this is likely - if there was a material change to the 2.0 software (especially one that has such a huge impact on battery life), Apple would have announced it and encouraged everyone to perform the upgrade.

Personally, I have conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I hope it's a software issue, so that I can go out and buy the 3G. The battery issue has been keeping me from upgrading.

On the other hand, by hoping that this is a hardware issue, this might press Apple to finally change the iPhone so that it has a removable battery.
 
usage times

Xenious said:
In General are your usage and standby times the same? I keep hanging or something with push enabled on Mobile Me and when that happens my use time and standby are exactly the same and my battery drops fast.

At that point I disable push, reboot and it usually stops.
Click to expand...

Yes, and odd thing is I took it off of the charger less than an hour ago and it says that usage since last charge is 3 hours, and standby time since last charge is 3 hours.

I charge my phone nightly at the wall and since 2.0, which I updated through itunes, my phone drains in around 12 hours. I'm not constantly on my phone, I'll check my personal email from it while at work, send a couple text messages, and possibly a phone call or two throughout the day. By 7 or 8 at night I'll have the warning that less than 20% of the battery remains.

Someone else mentioned turn off Location Services. I can live without both services if need be, but since I had a .mac account which turned into mobileMe I'd like to utilize the push feature. I'm going today with Location Services off to see if there is a change. If I don't see a change I'll turn push off tomorrow.
 
I'm finding the same as the OP on my 2G.

Location services is turned off already, which helped a little bit, but not much.

Phazer
 
I found that turning off location services gave me back my 1.x.x battery life, so I just leave it off now. I mean, sure, I can't geotag my photos anymore (ohnoes!), but I value an extra day of battery life over that :)

I also keep .Mac (I refuse to say MobileMe, they just keep making the name stupider. I miss iTools :'( ) push on during the day, and off at night.
 
PUSH is a serious battery chewer. I turned that off, location services off, FETCH to manual. And things improved significantly! But I am STILL not getting the usage out of my old phone that I did before 2.0.

Has anyone noticed any improvement with 2.0.1?
 
it was location services

for me it was location services, in order to narrow down the culprit I was only turning off an item at a time. With location services off I was good.
 
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