I bought my first Apple product ever last week - an iPhone 3GS. Its very nice and sleek and fast and lovely but should the battery run down as much as it does?

Since last charge...
Useage: 40mins
Standby: 1 hour, 39 minutes

In reality I sent 3 text messages and played with an ap for about 5 minutes. I have the screen brightness turned all the way down, 3G is off, wifi and bluetooth are off. I'm already down to 86%

Is this normal? I have no point of reference with this being my first product.

It does sound a bit of a quick round down.

Did you fully charge it ? It isn't enough to just charge it til the battery indicator reaches the top, it continues charging after that point (the indicator changes to a different symbol when it stops charging).

Yes its been fully charged twice now - each time for about 10 hours (overnight)

I don't know how long an iPhone's battery should last, but I do think that new phone batteries need some exercise before they 'find their groove'.
I'd say try it for a few weeks and see if it gets better after a few cycles.

I'd say that is certainly true of my iPhone. I have just had my iPhone 3G replaced (8 days out of warranty, but managed to twist their arm a little) and the battery was great, the new one is running down much much quicker than my old one, but the old one did this for the first couple of months too so I'm not too worried.

On my old iPhone the bottom button stopped working, and that renders the phone pretty useless. I have found once you get past the first bit of attitude from the "Genius", Apple's customer care is solid, and I would say if you think you have a problem go and see them and they'll be pretty honest with you. I had to speak with the store manager to get the replacement but everyone was cool about it in the end.

Cheers

Cris.

Sounds low. Possibly bad battery in that phone, worth taking back to the store.

Battery life extension tips:

Change your email-checking frequency to its longest possible interval, which I think is 1 hour.

Turn off beeps/vibrations for the email feature so it's not constantly vibrating to let you know you've got an email.

Turn off bluetooth if you're not using it.

Turn off the thing that prompts you for new 802.11 networks, and don't join every network you see. Spend most of your time on 3G.

If you have low cellular signal strength where you spend most of your time, that could be the whole reason for the battery drain. Is that the case?

My iPhone uses far, far less battery when idling on wifi compared to idling on 3G. If I am in range of a wifi network that I can use I always make sure I am connected, it makes my battery last longer.

Interesting. I get the opposite. Probably depends on proximity to the cell tower and/or the access point?

Almost certainly. Despite being ringed by masts our house has crappy reception for both 3G and 2.5G. Turn wifi off when I am at home and using apps on and off and the battery will be dead before tea time.

I don't get a great signal at my desk in work, maybe 2 bars. No 3G access so I turn that off at work. Wireless is totally off.

I charged over night and now at 78% battery:

Usage: 1 hour, 24 minutes.
Standbby: 3 hours, 55 minutes.-

Sent 5 text messages, one email and one 2 minute phonecall. How does that sound?

Thing is, if this phone has an issue, how much grace do I have before I can get a swap for a new handset? Are Apple quite good about it? Or should I let them know now so that its been noted?

Yes. Very very good about it. Walk into an Apple store and they just do the swap, with practically no questions asked.

However, that's the USA version of the story. I seem to recall that you're in the UK, either from something you said before or from the way you phrased that sentence quoted above (an American would have said "is" instead of "are", and might not have used the word "quite" in that way).

Anyway, I don't know what the situation is like in the UK for this sort of thing. I would hope it's as good as in the US.

The usage number indicates that the phone has been awake a lot longer than your usage notes would indicate, which to me indicates an issue with background operations, specifically push connections and/or other things that get refreshed in the background like subscribed calendars.

For an experiment, try turning off notifications and ALL push accounts (inc mobile me), all timed pull accounts, and temporarily disable any shared calendars. Then power the phone down and back up again just to be sure there's no cruft left.

Leaving BT and WiFi on do not significantly impact standby life at all (BT is parked, wifi is totally quiesced when in standby). GPS is only ever powered up in location apps so no need to alter location services.

This should result in very good standby life - though a less useful phone. Try it for a day and see what happens. I can say that it's unlikely to be a HW issue and I guess the 2.0/2.1/2.2 comments probably apply - ie 2.0 had awful battery life and later versions fixed several important bugs...

UK apple service should be great if you want to swap it, but I'm really not sure swapping then restoring your current setup onto a new phone is actually going to help you much.

3G connections are kinda like dial-up... to transfer any info you have to bring the link up (much like initiating a voice call).

When the link's up you have lots of bandwidth, but you're burning voice-call amounts of power until the NETWORK (not the phone) determines that you are idle and drops you back into paging state. Then, the next byte of data in each direction will bring the 3G data link up again and so on. I know AT&T has about a 7 second timeout here, so you burn at least 7 seconds of airtime to send - or receive - a single byte, and every transaction has another 7 seconds of power burnt at the end of it before returning to low power. This number will vary from network to network, some are as high as 30 or 60 seconds, meaning that even the smallest simplest transaction burns a huge amount of power.

Compared to this, WiFi and even EDGE are power misers, being very low power unless actually actively sending or receiving data.

Supposedly, this is progress. In the next 3G spec they have added the capability for the mobile device to hint to the network that it's finished for now and can it please tear down the data link (eg: I've loaded that email message/web page/etc, chances are there will be some idle time now so can I save power please?). Why the hell this wasn't part of the original spec or the HSDPA spec or.... who knows.

fyi, the vibe doesn't actually take much power at all. It's the push connection/waking up and talking to email servers that is the biggie here.

Owning both ends of the link (as blackberry do) is about the only way to really get push mail working in a lean fashion. WinMo and exchange activesync suffer pretty much the same as the iPhone does with push...

As I just said, bluetooth is a real power miser. I've never turned it off myself. WiFi, even if associated to a network, is very low power. 2G, as the settings menu says, takes less power than 3G, especially for sparse data traffic.

Hey Hugo, on a related note, namely storage, are we ever going to be able to remove built-in applications? I can't think of a single one that's as good as some third-party one you can download from the App Store. I'd love to be able to replace the host of poorly designed apps such as Mail, Notes and Maps, as well as eliminate completely things like Yahoo and Stocks. I have a passionate hate-on for Maps.

I'm so tired of the "best of the worst" that defines this platform.

No idea, neither my department or my right to comment on that. From a purely technical point of view, any jailbreaker will note that those apps are in the read only system partition though, so they don't take any space that you could actually use even if you did delete them.

You can always just move all their icons off to the last app page and forget about them, though. I disagree a bit with you about mail and maps, they work fine for me.

Yahoo isn't a built in app...

I find that with a lot of stuff you end up using it because there's either no alternative or the implementation is simply better than what ever else is already out there. Niethr of those situations may mean that the app in question is ideal or very well thought out though.

With Maps, on the Touch, in the last 2.x software release for instance, I can't get it to stop linking my "Current Location" to the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. I suppose it picked that location based on one of SkyHook's profiles WiFi hotspots while I was down there in April. However, because the device doesn't have GPS, and the SkyHook DB is of (very) limited use, there should really be a way to set the current location manually, the same as dropping a pin.

Map data can only be downloaded a tiny bit at a time and only while online - which on this device makes it almost unusable as a reference tool for a drive or even a decent walk. When you plan a route you have no preferences as to how that route is chosen, nor can you pick alternate routes, like you can from the Google Maps web site.

In general I disagree with a number of UI design elements which makes control of many apps, including Maps, confusing and unintuitive. On top of everything you then get app denials based on "user confusion by duplicating functionality" when a developer realizes the shortcomings of what's built-in and wants to make something better.

Another app I think is the pits is the iPod/Music app. Though I don't know of any viable alternative for that ATM.

I barely use the Touch anymore. I do take it with me when I travel, because in a pinch I can use Safari to look something up at a free hotspot. But mostly it's been used as a controller for my SqueezeBox because that's frankly what it's been best at. If I were more into gaming I'm sure I'd have a lot more use for it, but as it stands, I do really get frustrated pretty much every time I have to use any of the software that Apple's already included with it. Which is infinitely better than the software on other PMP and phones, but IMO, just not up to scratch in many ways.

Yup, my biggest increase in battery life came when I changed my email-checking frequency.

Just a quick note about that for Phil: Originally I hadn't realized that it would still check email at the moment I opened up the email app. At first I thought that it would *only* check mail at the timed frequency or when I pressed the refresh button. When I later noticed that the act of opening up the email app would start a connection and do a mail-check, then I didn't mind decreasing the automatic-checking frequency.

....and sitting idle in the mail app for 5 minutes makes it refresh too, I believe...