The Guardian wonders why, if all the other claims for iPhone 4S performance show improvement over the iPhone 4, the standby time has dropped so precipitously:
Here’s a puzzle: where, or how, did the iPhone 4S drop 100 hours’ standby time?
According to official figures on Apple’s site for the phone, it has a standby time of 200 hours (that’s 8 days and 8 hours). That’s a long time. But it’s much less than the 250 hours quoted for Apple’s first effort at its own phone, the iPhone in 2007 — and it’s far less than the 300 hours given for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. (See the iPhone comparison page on Apple’s site.)
Other battery life figures quoted by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller during his presentation at Cupertino included lots of data about the new phone (on which the new Siri voice assistant is impressive), and its battery life: 8 hours of 3G talk time, 14 hours of 2G talk time, 6 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 9 hours of Wi-Fi browsing.
Other battery life statistics for the iPhone 4S’s battery life — 3G talk time, 2G talk time, 3G internet browsing, video playback — are the same or better, apart from the Wi-Fi browsing, which is given at nine hours for the 4S, and 10 for the iPhone 4.
I would note that I never found the iPhone 3G real world performance to be anything close to the claimed 300 hours: 72-96 hours would take my iPhone from full charge to redline. As a rule, I shut down my phone overnight, because it didn’t make sense to leave it on standby using up a significant proportion of the battery while I was sleeping.
And just because I still love Joey deVilla‘s explanation of the prospective iPhone 4S customer dilemma, here it is again:
