Battery life of a Microbe

My wife uses an expres­sion to describe bat­tery-powered tech­no­logy that runs out of juice before it ‘should’ — Bat­tery Life of a Flea, is how she describes it.

Well, if you thought you had prob­lems with iPhone or iPod Touch bat­tery life before, the new iOS4 update will not make you happy.

Accord­ing to many anec­dot­al reports in this art­icle, after apply­ing the update, iPhone/Pod users began noti­cing drastic­ally reduced bat­tery life on their devices:

Per­us­ing the Apple tech sup­port for­ums, it seems that many users are con­cerned about the impact iOS4 has had on the bat­tery life of devices that appar­ently worked just fine pri­or to upgrad­ing the OS. It isn’t clear, though, wheth­er mul­ti­task­ing is at fault, or if the bat­tery drain is a res­ult of cer­tain, poorly-writ­ten apps gob­bling up power.

The thread begins with this user post “I just down­loaded iOS4 on my 3GS. And…wow, has my bat­tery life shrunk over the past two hours. I’ll admit I haven’t had the OS for that long so I don’t know how much it’s the actu­al factor, but I’ve been try­ing new fea­tures and what­not (minus mul­ti­task­ing much) and it’s just suck­ing away at my battery.”

Our exper­i­ence is sim­il­ar; the device now needs daily char­ging,  and the only way to extend bat­tery life is to kick it into ‘Air­plane’ mode.

As the art­icle also points out, Apple seems to be aware of the issue, though they’re recom­mend­ing a full rein­stall­a­tion of the OS, though that seems to get var­ied results.

And there does­n’t seem to be a way to ‘revert’ your OS back to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion. I’m sure the Jail­break­ers will have some­thing on this shortly 🙂

Dis­ap­point­ing update, Apple. No wall­pa­per or multi-task­ing  for my 2G iPod Touch — and now a bat­tery that dies quite quickly.

Oh, if you want to read anoth­er per­spect­ive on the iOS4 / iPhone 4  update, check out this list of 8 Down­falls Of The New iPhone 4.