John’s Blog

Weird problem today — I was watching a bit of video on my iPhone, then stopped & went away for a while — it had more than 50% charge left when I walked away. When I came back, it was dead — felt warm to the touch. No buttons would work, black screen, nothing. Rebooting wouldn’t work at all. I plugged it in for a while and after an hour or so it showed that it was charging again, but at about 5% — now, after charging most of the afternoon, looks like it’s up over 90%. Not sure what happened, but will be watching it.

my first full day of use suggests that battery life is gonna be a problem for me. it’s 8:45p now, and i’ve got maybe 10% of my battery life left — that’s after leaving the house 13 hours ago (that’s when i remember unplugging my phone).

having said that, the phone is showing 14 hours 18 minutes of standby time (which might be right, since it’s about when i woke up this morning — very possible i started using it right away), and 6 hour 19 minutes of use, which i guess includes everything.

26 minutes on the phone, and about 6.3 MB of data received over EDGE and 1.1 MB sent.

we’ll see what happens in the days ahead (and how much longer the phone lasts now), but i think this may be a problem for me. today, like all mondays, was an active day — i didn’t get to sit much at my desk, and so was checking my mail a fair bit (and doing demos), but after about 4p, i found myself really watching the battery meter a lot and thinking that if i had been talking on the phone more or using the ipod more that it’d be even lower.

i have a couple of ideas on why it depleted so quickly — i have 2 e-mail accounts set to check every 15 minutes, and mostly stayed within WiFi range of the office all day (and i have it set up to auto-join WiFi networks that it recognizes).

i think the way the WiFi works is that it connects when it needs to (to check e-mail or something) and then disconnects after a period of inactivity — if WiFi drains significant power (and that’s my guess) then i may have effectively kept the WiFi power drain on for most of the day. i may move e-mail checks to every 30 minutes and change the brightness setting a little bit for tomorrow — that would reduce the load, i think.

anyway, we’ll see, but a little troubling for the first day. lots of other things i noticed — mostly i really like using it, and the pictures of my family on the main screen & when they call really brighten my day — they’re just shown in a vivid, fun way.

so hopefully i’ll be able to figure out a way to get the battery life more workable…

3 things about the phone this morning:

1) i really miss a few things from other devices — even back on my original palm pilot, there was a row of 4 application buttons — you could assign them to any applications. the iPhone would really benefit from those — 1 button access to calendar, mail, phone and ipod (or whatever 4 apps you want). i think there’s plenty of room on the front to accommodate, and it’d help a lot.

2) i haven’t done a lot of testing on this yet, but seems like when you wake up the phone, it’s connected to EDGE (naturally, since to receive calls you’ve got to always be talking with cell towers), but the WiFi takes maybe 3-5 seconds to wake up. so for a guy like me, who wakes it up to check e-mails in a sadly OCD quick way, sometimes i get to checking mail before the faster connection kicks in, which results in a slower e-mail checking time than if i had taken longer to do the…um…what do you call these things…gestures? swipes? you know what i mean.

3) it’s killing me a little bit that you can’t rearrange icons on the home screen — that would help a lot very quickly.

i set up a Flickr contact this morning so that i can send pictures that i take to flickr automatically — but haven’t gotten the flickr2blog stuff to work right yet. will play with that later.