iPhone4S, the battery life sucks.

I now have an iPhone 4S as you can see in the pic­tures I have taken in this post! I’m quite happy, how­ever there is one thing which wants me to change phone and I’ve decided that I’m chang­ing to another phone. The reason:

The bat­tery lasts 8 hours accord­ing to Apple, how­ever that’s only if you use it for menial tasks, such as phone call­ing and send­ing texts. Although it is indeed a phone that I’m buy­ing, it just isn’t a phone I’m buy­ing, I bought the phone because it’s a smart-phone.

It has many func­tions such as being able to watch YouTube videos, lis­ten­ing to music, play­ing games, brows­ing the inter­net etc. Today, I used this phone for around 4–5 hours — I wasn’t con­stantly play­ing on it and then sud­denly to my amaze­ment, per­haps after around 4 hours, the bat­tery ran out.

My girl­friend has a “Sam­sung <insert model name>” and there is one thing that she can do, that my iPhone can­not. She can replace the bat­tery. i.e. She can charge 2 or as many bat­ter­ies as she wants to buy and she lit­er­ally has a phone which can last for the whole week or more if she buys more bat­ter­ies. You can­not change the bat­tery in an iPhone, as the bat­tery is inte­grated, which sucks because when you use this thing to watch movies, you’ll soon find out, you are out of elec­tric juice. Where with my girl­friends phone, she can sim­ply replace her bat­tery with another that she charged ear­lier on and she has no prob­lem what­so­ever or any issues with her phone run­ning out, if she lis­tens to music or plays a few games while on the bus, train or anywhere.

I guess that is one design fault which Apple needs to address. They either need to lengthen the bat­tery usage amount or make the bat­tery replaceable.

I have other qualms, how­ever those ‘other’ issues can be solved by jail-breaking the phone, which voids war­ranty, it depends which way you want to go with your iPhone 4S to make it more usable by jail-breaking it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely phone, the inter­face is nice & smooth and I’d really love the soft­ware in a Sam­sung or HTC phone, as it appears more ver­sa­tile, con­sid­er­ing you can add mem­ory and change the bat­tery; amongst other things.

How­ever the one thing that, per­haps, most smart-phone mak­ers need to address is the bat­tery time. Although it seems it is improv­ing, I think there is still more work to be done on improv­ing the life of the bat­ter­ies. We should really be at the age where bat­ter­ies should last on gen­eral usage; 24 hours.

Oh and this is the first smart-phone I’ve owned. Apolo­gies if there are any igno­rant remarks.