iPhone Battery Life
Well, today I decided to stress test the iPhone’s battery. I pulled the iPhone, fully charged, from its cradle at 7AM this morning. I had initially dropped the screen brightness to a very low setting. But for todays test, I upped it to about 50%. Keep in mind that at 50%, the iPhone is very very bright.
On my 1 hr drive in to work, I made one short phone call, and listened to music the entire way in. I continued to listen to music on the iPhone all morning (probably about 3 hours). I did a little surfing at lunch of both email and web. When I got back to work, I listened to some more music (probably at about 4 hours of music usage now).
I made three more short phone calls on my way home work, all while listening to music (5 hours total now). When I got home, I surfed the web for about 10 minutes, while listening to David Pogue’s podcast about Digital SLR cameras.
At about 7PM after making a short phone call, the iPhone’s battery gave up the ghost and was completely depleted. So that is about 12 hours of what I would term medium level usage on a full charge with the screen set to about 50% brightness. This confirmed what I had thought – the iPhones biggest power sucker is the screen. The lower you can set the brightness, the more battery time you will get for all your other uses.
The iPhone does a good job of turning off the screen when it is not in use, but even with the default setting, a brighter screen means much less usage time.
