iPhone 3G Battery Life….the myths and the truths that I have experienced so far….

Even before the iPhone 3G was released there has been a lot of talk and in fact ridicule about the IPhone 3G’s battery life. Though I was concerned about this so called downside of the iPhone 3G it dint bother me much or hamper my decision to get an iPhone 3G. Now that I have had my iPhone 3G for almost a month and I got a couple of question on my youtube comments I decided to share my experience with the iPhone 3G’s battery life and what I have been doing to get the best out of it so far. 

Before actually starting to talk about the iPhone 3G’s battery life, let me explain a lit bit of what type of an user I am. I am student as most of you know and hence I use it a lot for playing my music and typically some 20 mins of watching videos in the gym daily. I use it check my mails regularly when I am away from my laptop and of course the phone calls. I play games typically form 20-30 mins a day mostly in the nights. While I am not a heavy cell phone user by any means I will definitely fall into the average user category.

The first day I started using my iPhone 3G I was a bit shocked on how quickly the battery drained. I barely managed to get back home after work with the phone still switched on. So I went online and checked a couple of videos on how to optimize the iPhone battery life. These are the steps I took:

1) Switched off auto-brightness and set the brightness level around 20%, which is more than good for everything from browsing to the games. 

2) Put the auto lock on the iPhone 3G fro one minute so that it does not remain awake when I dont use it or more than a minute. 

3) Since I have wifi in my house and in my college I hardly am out of internet connectivity and I have turned the 3G off in the networks. While I dont want to lose the advantage of having 3G I also dont want to use it when I have a wife as wifi is definitely faster than 3G and doesnt drain the battery nearly half as much. By the way 3G in my area is very strong and it is almost as fast as wifi, though I lose 3G when I go out of my city into some neighboring cities.

4) I have the “push” turned off for my yahoo mail and hence will check only when I open the account in the email app or when I click on the refresh arrow on the left bottom of the mail app. I also have the “fetch option for my other mails like gmail and mobile me turned to manual. That means it will only update when I click on the mail app or the particular inbox. While this might not work for everyone it might be useful to have the fetch mail in the imap accounts as less frequently as possible. 

5) I also have my location based services turned off as the iPhone 3G will continuously update your location when you are on the move and the GPS feature of the iPhone 3G is probably the second most battery draining feature after playing games on the iPhone 3G. 

6) Another important thing I have turned off is the look for wifi as I dont want my iPhone 3G to keep searching for a wifi network when I am on the go when I dont want it to. I know the networks I regularly use and have already connected to then atleast once and hence the iPhone 3G will connect to them whenever it finds one and I have no necessity for it to keep searching for a wifi always.

7) I also have the bluetooth turned off as I dont at present own a bluetooth headset.

While on one hand I accept all these are not comforting it is not that difficult as most of these are one time things other than 3G toggling (atleast for me). While I expect Apple to do something about improving this battery life, I have read in more than a few sources that iPhone 3G battery life is one of the best its class, the smartphones using 3G. If you ask me all this is a small price I am willing to pay to own this amazing piece of gizmo for myself. 

Having said all this there is also a couple of other things; one, playing games really drains your battery life so make sure you have the charger with you when you want to play games for a long time. The second one is that I have calibrated my iPhone 3G’s battery a couple of times, i.e., I have let it get discharged completely and then charged it fully again. It only takes utmost an hour to charge it completely from the scratch. I typically charge it in the morning before my breakfast before I leave for work for typically 45 minutes and it is fully charged. 

My experience with the battery life of iPhone 3G has not been so bad as I feared, but certainly not the best. I am planning to get myself one of those tiny additional battery packs that you can get for around 30 bucks and they double your iPhone 3G’s battery life. Hope the information was useful and do post any question you have got. Thanks for reading!