Battery Life

[raisinbagel]

I'm a pretty experienced iPhone user, I started back when the 3G originally released but I have a few questions regarding iPhone 4. I recently purchased one because battery is a very important factor to me, and I figured I deserved an upgrade from my 3G anyways. I read in Engadget's iPhone 4 review that they were able to crank out 38 hours of battery out of this beast. After purchasing the phone and syncing my data from my old iPhone I haven't been so lucky with my battery. I feel like its average at best. I'm a user who likes to enjoy all of the features of what I purchased without having to sacrifice other features, such as battery life. I mostly have a question regarding the effect on battery using Apple's push notification system on applications and on the e-mail client built into the phone. I also would like to know if anyone else had any other comments on other noticeable battery killers. I'm a fairly tech savvy so I know that obviously some things such as keeping the screen running on full brightness and no screen time-out will kill a battery quickly, but from what I understood was that push notifications were supposed to conserve battery life, and not kill it. Anyways I'd like to hear what everyone here has to say, this is my first post here, and I apologize for the long winded post.

 

[Roo Zilla]

Turning on push notifications will lessen battery life. In order for push to work, the phone has to maintain a TCP connection with the network, doing so uses power. The idea behind push notifications conserving power is that the program itself does not have to constantly run, which would lessen battery life even more.

 

[zacharace]

Push is probably the biggest sap I can think of. Running a lot of apps in the background--especially those that are doing something (for lack of a better term) or are frozen in state--supposedly uses excess battery, but I've heard from different sources that this effect is negligible. Other than those two, the basics of battery drain--brightness, app usage, WiFi/3G usage, etc--are pretty much self-explanatory.

 

[JNHohol]

I get 6 hours of screen-on usage, without streaming music (Rdio, Pandora, etc.). I have push enabled for (7) apps & a couple that have native (non-network push) alerts.

If I don't use continuously (maybe 3 hrs), I can go all day and still be 60-70% by night. Overall the battery life has been great.

I never use Location services, always have 3G on and use it for most of my data consumption. I turned off all my native email push and used PushMail for all my email notification needs.

There definitely seems to be some bugs with background/saved states/fast app switching where some apps can really drain battery. Skype was one that really seamed to kill my battery when I moved out of if while running.

 

[zkyevolved]

I got the iPhone 4 and battery life was terrible. With 3G off I got 6 hours. Now I'm getting 6 or 7 hours of screen usage with 3G because my old iPhone was defective. This one is fantastic. I hammer this thing all day Apple did a good job. It's not as good as my blackberry 9700 but it's double in almost every aspect and has a smaller battery. I can't complain that I get 70 % of the same life as my bb with 3G on both. Turn off 3G and this phone can't even last 1 day while the bb can go 3 or 4. Lol.

Regardless. This phone has great battery life compared to others. fantastic. Btw. Games kill this battery. Try to stay off 3d games and location services. Those will kill you. Haha.

 

[stkywik]

One thing that I did to improve on my battery life is to stop pushing email to the phone and instead set it to fetch email ever 15 minutes. The gain in battery life wasn't dramatic, but it does add about 10 percent over the course of the day.

 

[raisinbagel]

I'm not saying your wrong by any means but I just feel like having fetch email should be way more battery consuming than having push. I guess I just don't understand the technologies as well as I thought.

 

[Roo Zilla]

I'm not saying your wrong by any means but I just feel like having fetch email should be way more battery consuming than having push. I guess I just don't understand the technologies as well as I thought.

Push mail has to constantly maintain a TCP connection with the network. It doesn't work otherwise. The constant connection can potentially be a severe drain if you are in an area with weak signal as the radio struggles to maintain the connection. If you use fetch, the phone only makes the connection at timed intervals and downloads the emails as necessary. If you are in areas of predominantly strong signal, using push might not be a heavy drain, and you might not even notice it. I can't imagine any situation though, where using push would use less power. It's just the nature of the technology. The Blackberry system is significantly less power hungry, the connection is very similar to the regular digital cell phone connection, but it has certain drawbacks of it's own including the need for central servers to route data.