Battery Life

[know1uno]

I purchased an iPhone last Saturday and the battery life just didn't seem good to me. I took it to the AT&T store and they said that I needed to return that phone to the Apple store. I did that yesterday and got a new iPhone. I charged it all last night, via my computer.

I unplugged it this morning and right now it is about 11:28 CDT and the battery is showing about half remaining. I've made two phone calls on it today, at the most, no texting, nothing.

Do I have another stinker of an iPhone or is this normal?

[dturner]

Was it fully charged when you unplugged this morning? Make sure you don't have a faulty USB port and that the phone is really charging.
If it was fully charged, sounds like you need to return this one also.

[PartisanEntity]

It happens sometimes that the phone will discharge quite fast, usually this happens when some application doesn't shut down properly (IMO).

Rebooting usually brings it back to normal discharge levels.

The 3.0 update brings (will bring) some noticeable battery life improvements, nothing astounding, but every extra minute counts :)

[Hondamaker]

I purchased an iPhone last Saturday and the battery life just didn't seem good to me. I took it to the AT&T store and they said that I needed to return that phone to the Apple store. I did that yesterday and got a new iPhone. I charged it all last night, via my computer.

I unplugged it this morning and right now it is about 11:28 CDT and the battery is showing about half remaining. I've made two phone calls on it today, at the most, no texting, nothing.

Do I have another stinker of an iPhone or is this normal?There are a few things you can do to improve battery life. Turn auto-brightness off. I turn my brightness down to an acceptable level, then turn auto off. Turn off Location Services until you need it. Turn off Bluetooth and WiFi until you need to use them. Make sure if you listen to music that you completely turn off the ipod feature by holding down the Home button until the Home screen appears.

[dturner]

I did that yesterday and got a new iPhone. I charged it all last night, via my computer.

I unplugged it this morning and right now it is about 11:28 CDT and the battery is showing about half remaining. I've made two phone calls on it today, at the most, no texting, nothing.

Do I have another stinker of an iPhone or is this normal?
You guys are giving some good advice, but I think you are missing the point. This is a new phone that was "charged" overnight and after a couple calls, and no other activity, the battery is half gone.
That's why I ask OP to make sure the phone was indeed fully charged and not have a possiablye bad usb port and/or cord.

[mlass]

I would lean towards a USB like mentioned and try the charger that came with it.

[shutter13]

You also need to give it a bit of time, The battery life should improve over a week or two, but as was mentioned previously, turning off unnecessary features (location services ie; gps is a big one) will help and when you get the phone all of them are turned on.

Today my battery is at 76% with 59 minutes of usage, mostly emails, twitter, internet, mms etc...with 4 hours of standby. Seems about average to me.

[sstalk]

You also need to give it a bit of time, The battery life should improve over a week or two,

Please explain this to a non-battery expert. How can a lithium ion battery improve from its 'new' condition? Shouldn't the battery be as good brand new as when it is a couple of months old? I understand that it is easy to kill these 3G batteries, but not in a week (as long as it isn't defective).

[shutter13]

Almost all rechargeable batteries need conditioning, I have no idea why, but if you read the threads you will see quite a few people state that after a week or so battery life improves. It's anecdotal, and was my experience as well, but that could simply be that after a week or two you can put it down for a little more time, which will improve the life ;)

[sstalk]

If I may quote an older post regarding battery conditioning:

"Yeah that stuff about conditioning batteries was leftover from the old NiCad days. Li-Ions have been in use for quite a few years. But somewhere along the way, probably about the time NiCads were going out of style, people started getting the idea of conditioning the battery.

Now everyone has to un-learn what they learned too late in the first place. :laugh2:
__________________
Rob Honeycutt"


I tend to agree with unlearning old skills that we have learned. Especially since running a Li-ion battery all the way down is bad for it. This is just my 1/2 cents worth of thought.

[shutter13]

As stated

Almost all rechargeable batteries need conditioning, I have no idea why, but if you read the threads you will see quite a few people state that after a week or so battery life improves. It's anecdotal, and was my experience as well, but that could simply be that after a week or two you can put it down for a little more time, which will improve the life ;)

@ OP you may also want to take a look at http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html See which settings you can afford to turn off to preserve battery life.

[Hawk]

It's also always good to remember that this is not a normal lithium Ion battery either.
It's a Lithium Polymer, and the best way to treat the battery is to keep it topped off all the time and run it down every couple of months (not past 7%) to "recalibrate" the batter - according to Apple.
Personally, I don't run mine down, just reboot every couple of days, and only after it's fully charged.

[atldvd]

OP had only half batt remaining at 11:28 AM. That sounds pretty bad to me. Only possibility I can think of is if you're in a marginal area for the wireless signal, the transmitter in your phone cranks up its transmitter power to reach the tower with a good signal. I understand this can suck your battery pretty fast. Maybe you can try turning off 3G and see if it's any better. If that's the problem, a new phone won't help. You might have to move to a new house with better coverage!

[Ramesh]

There's one other factor: how's your signal? If you have a poor signal, it will BURN through battery. If that's the case, there's not a whole lot you can do. Personally, it doesn't sound THAT bad. Not great, but still...

[MrMike6by9]

I purchased an iPhone last Saturday and the battery life just didn't seem good to me. I took it to the AT&T store and they said that I needed to return that phone to the Apple store. I did that yesterday and got a new iPhone. I charged it all last night, via my computer.
....
Is there a possibility that the new phone/battery is not being fully charged using the computer versus the wall wart?

[ihack]

Plug it in to the wall charger overnight. Everytime I charge with my pc the battery don't last as long. Not sure why. But I tested this many times.

Could be just my pc and alpine head unit though.

[Hawk]

here's something strange. I restored my phone the other night and setup my phone as new. This morning I took it off the charger, browsed EIC and answered a couple posts. Wifi on, 3G on, everything else off. It showed 25 minutes of talk time and the battery was at half.
don't know what happened, but I'm a little concerned.
The only thing I did that was out of the ordinary was that I fell asleep with it in my pocket, which could have made it warm/hot. But that doesn'y explain 24 minutes of talk.