MobileUX

The big talk around the office this week has been about the iPhone battery and how bad it has been. With all radios on (3g, wifi, gps) most people were getting to mid afternoon with a dead battery. The problem doesn’t seems to be the 3g really (although it does consume more energy than the original 2g version) – it is the gps, with the wifi a close second. The bummer is that the radios in the device should fade to the background and what you can do with the device should come front and center. I don’t want to have to tell Google Maps turn on the gps radio so an application can find my location, then I manually turn it off afterwards to ensure that I can listen to music and send some texts on my bus ride home. I don’t want to have to think about it. To be fair, Apple was under a lot of pressure to introduce a 3g version of the iPhone, with gps mind you. There was disappointment around the first iPhone release, as cool as the device was, that it was running on EDGE.

So how much of it falls on Apple that the technology that we are all demanding is power-intensive. Its not cheap to run a 3.5″ screen with multiple radios running. So what would you be willing to give up to have longer battery life? Drop down to a a more standard-size 2.5″ screen? I had a Blackberry 8110 (the Pearl with gps) and it had the same problem – even though it didn’t have 3g, if I left gps running in the background, I could barely make it through a full day. So there is some trade-off at this point in the technology evolution, really at all points in the technology evolution. We want the latest hardware features, but they always come at a cost. I remember the Sidekick II and how cool it was to have a device that was constantly in communication with the network – downloading emails, keeping me abreast of incoming text and instant messages. But the battery took a hit.

So for now, I guess I’ll just have to plug my iPhone in during the day or be a little more conscious about what parts of the device I have turned on.