Jul 07

Reports of Poor Battery with iPhone 3GS and OS 3.0

A few complains started showing up in Apple’s forum with iPhone users reporting poor battery performance. The issue appears to be triggered by the iPhone OS 3.0.

“After updating to [iPhone] 3.0 the battery life is very short. It consumes 5%-10% an hour.
I completed the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade about 5 hours ago. My battery was fully charged at the time, about an hour ago the battery was reporting 20% charge, so in 4 hours it drained 80% of the battery.”

“Normally get 5 days or so with my 1st Gen iPhone in standby, but now lucky to get through the day. From a communication point of view my iPhone is now a liability.”

Other iPhone users complained about iPhone 3GS battery life:

Spaldo1 wrote “I just replaced my original iPhone with an 3GS and my battery kept going dead after just a few minutes of use. I kept charging it using my computer, the wall plug and my car adapter plug but it has continued to drain down much faster that my old iPhone.”

It seems the new software features of iPhone 3GS are a factor, but the hardware capabilities was expected to be better than the previous iPhone.

Apple suggested a few configuration changes to improve iPhone battery performance, such as Turn off push notifications, reduce use of location services, turn off push mail, turn off bluetooth…etc. However, one will wonder what’s the point of having these features if you can’t use them?!