OT : iPhone vs Blackberry (battery life)

After reading the other thread last week where someone claimed they used a BB
because they wanted a battery life more than one day, and seeing as I have
both phones at the moment (O2 taking its time about porting my number), I
decided to do a test.

Both fully charged.

After 6 days + 20 hours battery remaining is :-

iPhone 3GS : 4%
Blackberry Curve 8900 : 15%

iPhone is new, this is its second ever charge so it might get a tiny bit
better. It gets good signal strength. Used for listening to music for maybe
an hour, 10 mins of calls and an hour playing games.

Blackberry is 8 months old. Used for texting and calendaring. It gets poor
(but not that bad, see below) signal strength.

So I'd call it a draw.

Either has plenty of battery life for me.


(the BB lasted less than 3 days in an area with abysmal signal levels though,
as in you needed to hold it at arms length in the air to get any signal at
all. This seems to be common to all phones though as they wind their output
power up to max so they can reach the base station and they're constantly
trying to establish a link with it.)


Oh, and for anyone who managed to read this far, you must be as bored as me


(waits for inevitable post editing...)

 

L's iphone - 12 months old, heavy use kills the battery inside 12 hours.
My 8900 Curve - 3 months old, battery lasts 3-4 days of heavy use, over
a week if light use.

How the hell did you get a 3gs battery to last 6 days? Even from new
with light use L only gets 2 days max and that's comparable with other
users she knows.

The curve *sucks* for reception (Orange), its a work phone though so I'm
stuck.

I'd still take the iphone given a choice, but I'm a bit OCD with
charging a phone overnight so the low battery life wouldn't bother me.

 

How the **** did you manage that? I can't get mine to last anything
like that long. Maybe if I didn't use it at all...

 

Dunno. It must like me

I get crappy 3G reception round here so I've turned that off. WiFi is on all
the time. Bluetooth turned off cause I don't use it.

Even so, from other peoples battery life reports turning 3G off should only
extend it by 20% or so.

 

Heh. I'll see what it does when the number is ported and it is my only phone.
But thinking back to the iPhone 1G I had that used to last 4 days easy when
it was 12 months old, after 5 days most of the time it was still going but on
its last legs, sometimes it'd die on the evening of the 5th day.

<looks up "Usage">

3 hours 35 minutes.

I've no idea what is included in "usage" though?


What do you do with your phone? Have it on vibrate strapped to your dick and
call it all the time?

 

and apparently leave the webcam on!

Wifi and 3G are on all the time, as is push.
Otherwise, I use it for calls (not much at the moment), SMS and
Whatsapp messenger, checking email if I'm away from the MBP.

Lately I'm certainly not in the heavy user category.

 

Push email kills the iPhone battery life.

If you're not using push, then it will last ages with 3G turned off.

I get a day, at the most, as I hammer push and 3G all day.

 

I've got an 8900 Curve on O2 - the reception on it seems to be pretty
good.

I've managed to do a fully charged battery in under a day
though... ;-) (1)

(1) Using it as an MP3 player whilst surfing the net with it logged
into Live Messenger doesn't help in this respect...

 

If you disable bluetooth and (especially) Airport, an iPhone's battery
life extends surprisingly well.

 

iPhone 3GS, pushmail off (checking every 15 minutes, supposedly), Wifi
on but 3G most off the time. Usually lasts about a day but I've seen
up to 4-5 days on standby.

Use the iPod of it as well and it'll just about lasts from morning to
evening.

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

I gave up surfing / playing games on it because of the small screen.

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

It's set to poll for new email once an hour.

Anything important and people will phone me so I don't see any point in
scanning for new email any more often than that.

(I haven't bothered to read about it but does the iPhone 3GS "push" email
actually push it onto the iPhone? If it does then the server at Apple does
the monitoring of new email and the iPhone shouldn't have to do anything
apart from receive the email when it's pushed to it. If it's not really
"push" but "check every nanosecond" then I can see why it'd kill the battery
if you're checking every 30 seconds or so)

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

Turn 3G off until you need the fast data speed (why the hell don't they do
that automatically I'll never know), set "push" to check once every 30 mins
or an hour and you should see it lasting 4~5 days easy as that's how mine is
setup.

 

Or, just charge it when I'm asleep. I didn't buy a V6 to detune it into
a Vtwin.

 

It's push - both from Apple and from Exchange. And it kills battery
life.

 

Can you make your Raspberry ring for more than two goes? Maybe its a
network thing, but its bloody anoying. Great tool but bloody
anoying...

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

You mean before it diverts to answerphone?

Yes, that is network controlled. Google on the funky code you need to put
into your phone (that's sent to the network) that changes the divert time.

IIRC you can change it from 5 secs upto 30 secs.

 

Thanks for that.