iPhone 3GS Battery Problem

On 02.22.10, In Technology, By AC Slater

Within the past couple weeks I’ve started to notice that the battery on my iPhone 3GS has been draining awfully fast for no reason. Prior to this latest issue, I’ve never had any problem with battery life. I charge my phone every night as I’ve done with every phone I’ve ever had whether it was completely dead or not, it’s just the most convenient time to charge it, plus it’s my alarm clock so I would hate for it to die over night. I know the iPhone’s are not known for their incredible battery life to begin with, but I’ve never had a problem before and could pull out at least 2 full days without a charge and moderate use, but over the past couple weeks I have been barely able to pull off 1 day on a single charge and I have no clue why.

I haven’t done anything different to the phone, I don’t recall installing any apps that would have caused this, yes my phone is Jailbroken, but I don’t run apps in the background, I pretty much only Jailbroke it so that I could use Lock Calendar to put my recent events on the lock screen (I hate having to click into the calendar to see what I have coming up). Sure I have Wifi, 3G and Push Notifications turned on, but I always have, so it’s nothing different. I even went so far as to restore the phone Saturday afternoon hoping that maybe it was just some glitch with the phone and a restore would fix the issue.

Before I did the restore though I had to make sure that the latest firmware version 3.1.3 had the ability to be Jailbroken and everything I read said that while it is able to be Jailbroken, if you don’t need to update the iPhone Dev Team recommended not updating. Now this is where I was torn, the release notes for 3.1.3 say that they address an issue with the battery meter going all funky and displaying the wrong percentage and not telling you exactly how much battery is really left. Now I’m not sure if this means that since the battery meter itself is going crazy that the phone bases it’s actual battery level on the meter, so if the meter says I only have 5% battery left, when in fact the phone has 80%, it will still shut off due to the information it’s receiving from the meter itself. And I also read that if you haven’t stored some hash information with Cydia you may not be able to jailbreak your phone in the future. So seeing as how my Cydia would crash on opening due to a corrupt repo download one day, I couldn’t have Cydia store that information for me, so I decided that was a good enough reason to restore to 3.1.2, for at least the time being.

Later I did some reading on how the 3.1.3. upgrade was working for everyone and I discovered that a lot of people were seeing slow downs and even worse battery life. I know that not everyone will have the same experience and these may not have all been 3GS experiences, but it was enough to keep me from upgrading to 3.1.3, but if this battery issue continues I feel like I’ll have no choice as it’s absolutely ridiculous that I unplug my phone at 5PM with 92% charge and by 8PM of almost no use it’s already at 50%. I have no desire to carry around my charger whenever I go out in hopes that I’ll have an outlet to plug my phone into, I already leave it charging at work, but this is really getting ridiculous.

Is anyone else experiencing similar issues? Did the update to 3.1.3 fix the issue? Are there any other fixes out there that I can try without having to update? I’ve already tried turning wifi off, but what’s the point of having a 3G phone if I need to turn the 3G off in order for the phone to function for a single day? I love my iPhone, but this is absolutely unacceptable.

Update: Phone is currently plugged in, I went to a few websites and the phone is now at 85%… I unplugged it and plugged it back in at it instantly jumped back up to 100%. Leave it to the Jesus phone to rise from the dead… seriously 3.1.3 might be in my immediate future despite the possible risks, this is ridiculous.

Update 2 (2/22/10): Looks like the culprit may be using an Exchange server to sync a Calendar. I don’t use Exchange for contacts or mail so those could also be the problem, but when I turn off my Google Calendar Sync Account (which uses exchange) the battery life seems to go back to what it was before. It’s only been about an hour, but so far it seems to be a huge improvement. (I think I spoke too soon). The only problem with this though is that I need that Calendar as it’s the one me and my girlfriend share so I have been using it for all of my appointments instead of the one native to the phone. So if anyone has a solution, please let me know.

Update 3 (2/23/10): The above account is everything that was happening yesterday, but after a full night plugged into the wall the phone seems to be alright this morning. I unplugged it from the wall at around 6am and it’s now 7:25am and I still have 100% battery. Wifi is turned on, 3G is turned on, the only thing that is not turned on is the Exchange Server connection to Google Calendar. I want to see how the battery does today without it on and I’ll turn it on later to see if that then causes the battery to drain. I just hope I didn’t jinx myself by posting this… we’ll see how it goes.

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Google Buzz

On 02.10.10, In Technology, By AC Slater

My Gmail account was just setup with Google’s new social networking tool, Google Buzz and after a few minutes of playing with it, I honestly wish this is what Twitter was like. Now, do I think that there needs to be yet another Twitter clone out there, no, but I would love to see Twitter implement some of the things that Google Buzz is doing. The way Buzz handles links, images and videos are much better than Twitter considering Twitter itself doesn’t handle any of that it relies on sites like Twitpic to create links to pictures that are stored on another site. Buzz embeds them right into the, umm, I have no clue what to call each update, there doesn’t seem to be a cool “buzz” word to use for them like Twitter has Tweets.

Anyways, links you post automatically grab a summary of the link, videos embed for viewing inline and pictures can show up in a nice little slideshow if you want. Much better implementation than Twitter, but it really just seems like a dumbed down version of Google Wave. I get that when Wave was announced it was thought to be this amazing thing that would change the way we communicate online, but it’s a little complicated and while it does do things pretty well, you need to have a use for it… and people to use it with, so it kind of fizzled out. I still use it during the day to talk to a few people and we’re currently using it to plan a trip for this summer, but it’s hard because not everyone going on the trip has it and/or knows how to use it. So it looks like Google took some of those cool aspects of Wave and implemented them into a Twitter clone that is built into GMail and thus available and has the possibility to be used by a lot more people.

The fact that it incorporates right into GMail is a huge plus since people don’t have to go all over the place to update it or use it. And it can also pull your tweets into it so you don’t have to update 2 places. So for now I don’t know that I’ll use it too much, but we’ll see. I think the overall user experience is a step up from Twitter, but with Twitter having such a huge head start and a rapidly growing user base it’ll be hard for Google to get people to switch over, but we’ll see.

What are your thoughts on Buzz so far? Will you leave Twitter and start using this or will you stick with Twitter and maybe have it update your Buzz feed?

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An open letter to Apple and Adobe

On 01.31.10, In Random, Technology, By Zack Morris

Dear Apple and Adobe,

Why does Flash for OSX suck so much? I mean it works fine for Windows, isn’t a memory hog, and won’t crash my browser. Every other aspect of my beloved OSX is superior whats so special about Flash that it cant get along? You guys are both huge mega successful companies, isn’t there anyway the 2 of you could possibly throw a couple people at the problem to help out the people who made you so large and rich and successful in the first place? Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Zack Morris

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My random thoughts on the iPad

On 01.28.10, In Random, Technology, By Zack Morris

So after finally hearing about this thing im not gonna lie I was pretty underwhelmed I mean first theres the name, iPad, I mean come on Apple really thats the best you could do? Then theres the fact that there is no multitasking on a device that is as Steve put it a netbook killer. And lastly theres no camera. So I slept on it and when I woke up this morning I realized this thing really is a pretty slick device and most likely Apple has reasons for the things I listed well other the name that I dont think Ill ever get. The multitasking? Well I have a theory on that wait for the next iPhone OS and it will be there, the lack of camera? that one im not really that sure of. I read somewhere that it could be due to the angle you would normally be holding the device at, or my thought is maybe it was a demand of ATT. I mean we all know how the iPhone has done a number on their network, perhaps they were worried of an onslaught on video messaging apps that would eat even more bandwith, who knows. But I actually think this device could be a key educational device, I could see it now upon admission to college you no longer would have to buy a bunch of expensive textbooks, instead you could get an iPad and pay a much lower rate to get your books from iTunesU, or maybe it would be iBooksU, who knows. On top of that you could get all your lectures and notes on thing and any required novels. It would be great. In the lower grade schools it could help save costs by having the textbooks on it and due to the smaller costs of the books in the long run it would most likely end up saving schools money as the cost for the latest editions would be less, though it could be an IT nightmare. They say Apple changes any market they enter, why cant it be education?

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Apple Announces the iPad

On 01.27.10, In Technology, By AC Slater

Steve Jobs took the stage today and announced Apple’s new Tablet computer, the iPad. Despite the ridiculous name, I was still interested in seeing what this thing could do, but after awhile became sadly disappointed. Now, I should have known that the rumors floating around regarding the features that would be built into this thing would be highly exaggerated, but essentially what we were shown is a glorified iPod Touch with optional 3G internet connection.

The iPad uses a variation of the iPhone OS, so those familiar with how the iPhone acts and responds will be at home using this thing, but it doesn’t seem to add anything remarkable to the OS. It will run all iPhone apps out of the box in either a 1:1 pixel mode or you can double the size and run a larger, albeit low res, version of the app. Obviously there will be apps in the future that will work natively with the iPad’s resolution and screen size, but for right now the majority of the apps are just going to be iPhone/iPod Touch apps. So as I said it’s essentially a larger scale iPod Touch/iPhone… I’m not terribly impressed.

I won’t go into all the specs of the iPad here since you can find them on every major news site out there, but there are a few things I’ll comment on. The lack of a camera, at all whether front or back, is a little disappointing. I would have thought at least a front facing camera for video chatting, etc. would have made it, but there is absolutely no camera on the device. The fact that it’s not widescreen is a little off putting as well as movies will not fill up the whole screen. I also don’t like the aesthetics of the unit in the fact that the screen doesn’t go anywhere near the edge of the bezel. I know it’s kind of a nit-picky thing to comment on, but it’s a little weird looking.

Now I will say that the price points aren’t terrible, but you have to add another $130 to the base price if you want the ability to get 3G service to the unit. What is cool is that the 3G service doesn’t come with a contract and the plans start at $15/mo for 250MB or $30/mo for unlimited, and the 3G is unlocked for worldwide use for any carrier that uses Micro SIM cards.

So I don’t know, it’s kind of cool, but it’s not as revolutionary as I was expecting it to be and I can’t see myself picking one of these things up in the near future. I was most looking forward to the announcement of a new iPhone OS, but that didn’t happen so naturally I’m a little disappointed overall.

So what do you guys think of the iPad? Are you going to pick one up? Do you see this knocking out the kindle in terms of e-books? Is this the saving grace that print media has been looking for?

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