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iPhone 3G Use is an Exercise in Compromise
By Dave Peterson | August 1, 2008
After an ill-fated attempt to get an iPhone 3G on its release day, I had to abandon my initial plan of picking one up at an Apple Store, and fall back to whatever Plan B would be acceptable to AT&T (the company from which I had to obtain a phone, due to an employee discount I didn’t know I had). I returned to the Seattle area from my trip to Texas, went to a local AT&T store, and placed an order for a phone. This is a process they’re calling Direct Fulfillment. The customer orders a phone in person or on the web, waits a couple of weeks, then gets a notification that the phone is available. If you can’t get your phone at an Apple Store, this system works pretty well.
Having had a little trouble with restoring backups recently, I was a bit concerned whether moving the backup taken from my original iPhone would work smoothly. It did, and personal data such as contacts and bookmarks were added to the new phone. The whole process took about an hour.
I’ve now used the 3G for a couple of days. By and large, I find very little difference between it and the original iPhone. There are two notable upgrades for me: One is the improved Location Services. Although the original iPhone’s system of locating by triangulating on network and cell signals was surprisingly good, sometimes it could also be inaccurate. And, if you were truly lost, it would be hard to know how much to trust it, particularly outside an urban area. The GPS-enabled 3G gives much more accurate locations, and it live tracks the phone as you move, rather than the old system which was a location snapshot. The other big improvement is the larger storage capacity. While a 16 GB iPhone has been available for a few months now, my old one was only 8 GB, so I’m enjoying expanded space to hold more music and video.
The most widely-touted upgrade, increasing data speed by moving to a 3G network, has proven of little use to me. Although I use data services on my phone constantly, and am usually in a 3G coverage area, I’ve found that the signal is often much weaker than the EDGE signal in the same area. It turns out that five bars of EDGE is just as fast (by my unscientific observation) as one or two bars of 3G, but the 3G sucks down the battery a lot faster. So today, with mild reluctance, I turned 3G off and returned to the EDGE world. If I’m in an area with a very strong 3G signal, I can always turn it on again, but it will come at a cost to the battery.
Power management has widely, and correctly, been reported as a much greater concern with the 3G. With my original iPhone, it was extremely rare that 18 hours away from the charger would leave the battery much more than half-depleted. Today, I used Location Services for about a hour, and web/email service throughout the day. I made no use of phone features, but by the time I got home (about 11 hours after unplugging from the charger) the battery was down to about 20% of its capacity. Battery life can be lengthened, ironically, by turning off most of the 3G’s new features, such as Location, 3G network, data push and fetch, and email fetch. Worth noting is that turning off fetch for applications will not turn it off for e-mail; that needs to be done one level deeper under the Settings menu (Settings > Fetch New Data > Advanced > Mail, Contacts, Calendar). With all these new features turned off, and activated only for short periods as needed, battery life becomes more comparable to the original iPhone.
I still think the iPhone 3G is a great device, and well worth the investment for someone who doesn’t have an original iPhone. However those who are not new to the iPhone should consider carefully exactly what they would gain in the upgrade and whether using those new features would result in an unacceptably short battery life.
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