cine + octo = boo

i spent the day testing out the resilience of my iPhone battery, and thought i’d put together a timeline to show how things progressed. for the purposes of this test, i decided to keep every known battery draining setting turned on in what i consider a full on stress test.

here are the details:

• 3G is on
• push notifications are on for foursquare, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger
• push mail is turned on for both a Yahoo! Mail account and an Exchange account
• location services are on

i took screenshots throughout the charging session, here’s what i came up with:

[block I]

3:30 pm — i started a charge, the battery was at 75% when i plugged it in

3:49 pm — no change after 19 minutes, however the “charging” symbol switched to the “plugged in” symbol — the phone thought it was fully charged

4:04 pm — still no change, but the phone has now reverted back to the “charging” symbol

[block II]

4:16 pm — still no change. at this point, i unplugged to run errands

5:30 pm — returned home from errands, plugged back in to charge. during my time away, the battery depleted 50%

[block III]

5:51 pm — within 21 minutes, the phone is back up to 75% charge

6:48 pm — nearly full charge. i checked on the charge flow, there were no hiccups (as witnessed in block I)

7:47 pm — nothing worth reporting during this hour, but i thought i’d add this in just to show that there were no further abnormalities

i’ll test traction throughout the day, tomorrow.

i was reading a review of push notification apps the other day, and my present situation started to fester. for those familiar, i’ve had to keep push notifications turned off in order to prevent rapid battery life loss and issues when charging my iPhone. reading about how others are enjoying push in some respects is frustrating, because there is really no sound reason why my issues are caused by push notifications.

so i buckled and decided to enter into another round of testing out settings, etc. all the while knowing that this could be painful (even possibly result in being potentially phoneless for a period of time. i re-enabled push notifications for foursquare, and opted to keep AIM (download on iTunes store) and Yahoo! Messenger turned off for the time being. what resulted was exactly as expected — rapid battery loss (down to 25% within 45 minutes off of the charger and minimal use) and charging issues (phone ceased to charge beyond both the 25%, 50% and 75% thresholds).

NOTE: people will question what that means (“If you couldn’t charge past 25%, how did you test the 50% and 75% points?”). with two simple methods:

1. the jiggle technique: by unplugging the phone and re-plugging it in repeatedly, i could occasionally trick the phone into charging beyond the 25% point. this is hardly rock solid, and frequently failed to work.
2. restore, restore, restore: for whatever reason, running a restore would override this bug and the phone would remain in charge mode throughout the restore process. often, the restore would last long enough to get the phone back up to nearly full charge. this provided a clue.

you see, i noticed that each restore would render the bug moot, but when faced with the decision to restore from a backup, the bug would resurface in the subsequent syncing of older data. could the issues reside in a corrupted backup? once the restore sync completed, the charging and battery life issues seemed to stick now, regardless of whether push notifications were on or off.

this led me to the next step in my testing process: erase all data on the phone (not just a software restore), and then set up the phone as an entirely new phone. this is a hassle in that all accounts would need to be reconfigured (email, etc.), but that’s a small price to pay for a more stable phone if it works. if it doesn’t, i’ll be taking yet another trip to the genius bar.

i’m pushing the phone to the limits to test this out, so i’ve activated location services, push notifications, and 3G. if battery life is better under these settings, it means i’m onto something here. so far the test has been going well. sometime (before 7am) we experienced a power outage, which means while the phone was on a charger, it was not being charged. all signs point to it having reached full charge, as it was full when i retrieved it this morning at around 8:30 a.m. since then, i’ve had an AIM conversation via push notifications, ran out for bagels at 9:39 a.m. (where i reclaimed mayorship using foursquare), read several blog posts, took photos, uploaded to flickr, tweeted, grabbed coffee, and returned home at about 11:19 a.m. once home, i took a snapshot of my battery life, which at ~25% after a little over two hours of heavy use seems like an improvement. mind you, i was seeing a drop to 25% of battery after 40 minutes of light use (3G off, location off, and push notifications on).

i’ll continue to monitor, and will report the latest on the blog as it develops.

in a slightly related note: Sarah Lacy posted about waning Apple fanboy-ism over on TechCrunch this morning. with the recent issues over Google Voice and other unapproved apps, i’m sure functional issues like these only impact blind devotion to Apple further. it’s my feeling that no one should be blindly devoted to anything. period. a critical eye is important to maintain — otherwise films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button end up getting a free pass from Fincher acolytes.

iPhone OS 3.0 brought with it a slew of new functionality, and some hidden gems. copy & paste, extended battery life, and push notifications were the three that piqued my interest most of all. after upgrading, i was happy to find that copy & paste worked well enough, and i actually found improved battery performance post upgrade. life was good. admittedly, i was a little disappointed that apps like AOL Messenger were not ready to go with push notifications right out the gate.

a little less than two weeks ago i noticed that my iPhone 3G was refusing to charge beyond 20%. the main battery indicator displayed 20%, and the indicator in the upper right displayed the “plugged in” battery symbol. definitely a mixed signal.

i decided to wipe the iPhone, do a full restore, and see if this improved things. after doing so, the iPhone accepted a full charge, and the next day we embarked on a trip to San Francisco via Caltrain. a few hours after leaving, and with very little use on the iPhone, the battery displayed 50% charge (and draining quickly). a couple notes on my settings before someone chimes in on with suggestions:

• brightness is ~30%
• 3G is off
• WIFI is off unless i’m in an area with known access
• push mail is on, but only for exchange. all other accounts are set to fetch

by the time we reached our destination the iPhone was well below 20%, so we decided to make a pit-stop at the apple store for a visit to the genius bar. after a short wait, the apple tech ran some tests on the iPhone, and then promptly replaced it with a new one.

back at home, i upgraded the OS to 3.0, then restored from a backup. things seemed to be going better, in that i could at least charge the iPhone without problems, however the battery drained quicker than i’d remembered prior to 3.0. over the next week, the iPhone’s battery life continued to dwindle in performance, and the mixed signal issues from the first round started up again.

this time i tested the iPhone charging behavior a little more. i noticed that unplugging and replugging the iPhone back in could eventually trigger a charge cycle. so, i left the iPhone on the charger for several hours only to return to find it was completely drained of battery. next, i decided to test different charging scenarios: plugged into a computer, directly plugged into the wall, and using different cables. all of this made no difference.

on the verge of yet another wipe and restore attempt, i happened to notice something that opened up another possibility. i received a push notification from foursquare while charging (with the charge indicator displaying the lightning bolt symbol). after i read the notification, something caught my eye — the lightning bolt in the upper right was now replaced with the “plugged in” symbol. to top it off, the push notification (when the phone was left locked) kept the iPhone’s display on. i monitored this for roughly 10 minutes, and the screen never went back into sleep mode. sure enough, the battery was draining steadily.

it’s completely reasonable to expect push notifications to have some impact on battery life, but this appears to be a bigger functionality issue. i’m not seeing the same behavior with other notifications (like text messages, missed calls, or voicemails). for now, i’m keeping push notifications turned off until the v.3.1 update to the OS drops. of course, this might not be the same for all. i’ve found that some people reporting the opposite case (push mail causing the drain, not push notifications).

i’ve tested the phone for 2 days since removing push notifications, and battery life is back to the “improved” levels from before enabling push notifications. i’ve yet to bump into any of the odd charging state confusions, and i’ve also been able to heavily use the phone while commuting on Caltrain with only a 25% loss of battery (this was unheard of on the 2.0 software).

anyone else experience similar issues?