Hi folk
I joined just to talk about battery life, I am getting frustrated because there seems to be some kind of bug in the system that causes increased wifi or 3G data coms activity, what I mean is, one minute every thing is fine and you are getting at least 24 hour battery life and then suddenly it just starts to discharge in about 5 hours.
I have owned all the versions of the iPhone (except 5) and I have had the problem on every one of them. On my/the first iPhone I returned it to apple and they replaced the phone, I got the impression it was a hardware fault, but now I don't think so anymore. I am sure I had it on my 3GS and now I have it on my iPhone 4. I have already fixed it once, just not sure what I did, made sure all the background apps were off, did a hard reset, anyway somehow got it back to normal, but then it happened again a week ago when I was 2 weeks into an OS holiday (I run a business and always keep in touch via email), it is very inconvenient to say thd least, makes you realize how much you depend on the thing. Anyway, version 5 of the OS came out so I thought great, I'll just upgrade the phone and all will be well! That did not go smoothly either, another bug came up, the "take forever to backup the phone, like 8 hours and still backing up" so I waited till I got back home and turned off the backup/restore photos option and got it upgraded ok, but battery discharge problem not fixed at all. (I read on another forum to put it in airplane mode between uses, that works, but not the sort of thing that the late SJ would have been happy with). So version 5 has some nice features but the phone is almost useless, if I go out for the day I will only have it for the first half of the day.
My thinking is that there should be some kind of app that lets you monitor power usage and which app is using the power. I also think the iPhone operating system should be immune to this kind of problem, sure bursts of 3G activity might be quite intense for minutes at a time but a battery load that persists and leads to a very short life should not be possible or if it happens should be alarmed.
I read somewhere that Apple knows about "the problem" and is working on a fix, but unfortunately I don't believe it. The problem has cropped up on every OS since the first and now I have it on OS5. I just don't think that Apple really know about it, or if they do, they must not care. I am not happy just to pay my $200 and have the phone replaced, I want to understand it do I don't have to have the problem surface again at some inconvenient time in the future. If I thought I could get Apple to and analyse my problem properly I would happily send them my phone! I said I was frustrated, that accounts for the tone of my post.