A quick Thought About iPhone Issues
Posted on 14 August 2008, at 7:00 am, by Christopher Spera
During dinner with Clinton Fitch last night, he and I got talking about which devices we use. I’m in the iPhone 3G and he’s in the Advantage. That thing is HUGE, but what a wonderful screen it has. Big, bright, roomy…just…wow.
The first thing out of my mouth is that it must suck the battery power real hard. However, while my 3G had a full battery before dinner (and Clinton was working from a partial…) I’m the one who ran out of power before I got home, not Clinton.
The reason why people like me and Clinton (and yes, sites like Gear Diary) make such a stink about issues like the iPhone’s battery life is to help OEM’s/ODM’s correct issues like this by testing, gathering information, and by pointing out where the problems are. However, we can only be effective at what we do if the OEM/ODM listens…
By all counts, Apple is working on ROM update 2.1 for iPhone, bit no one knows what issues it will address. While we don’t necessarily need all the details, it would help if Apple would simply acknowledge the device’s issues.
Right now, they are refusing to do that, especially with signal strength and battery life issues. And people like me writing for sites like Gear Diary don’t know if we’ve been heard, acknowledged or what. I’m not looking for a pat on the back or any kind of validation; but I am looking for some kind of response from Apple or AT&T, depending on the issue – we heard you and are actively working on the issue, we’re working on resolving the problem but won’t have a fix until mm-yyyy or we aren’t planning to fix that at this time.
The whole situation stymied Clinton last night. It doesn’t make sense to me either. What would you do? How would you approach this issue? Why don’t you join us in the discussion and give us your thoughts.
Posted from my iPhone…
Update: Chris Gavula sent me a TXT citing this article at MacNN. It references an update from Apple that is supposed to address signal issues, and therefore battery life.
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August 14th, 2008 at 8:22 am
What would I do? The same thing you’re doing – making sure the issue stays in the front of people’s minds. I’ve made posts about it at JAMM and JAiB as well as using Twitter to make my voice heard. I personally could care less if its Apple, AT&T or the chipset … something is broken in a bad way (I use EDGE on my 3G by choice) and there’s no way that should have to continue. This isn’t as bad as the MobileFailMe debacle but its still not up to Apple quality standards.
August 14th, 2008 at 8:48 am
This is sadly the way Apple has functioned *forever* … they clamp on rumor sites, don’t readily discuss issues, and are just generally very tight lipped about everything.
I have an iPod Touch 32GB, and when I updated to 2.0 firmware I watched my battery life go down drastically. I now micromanage my WiFi setup (one of my office areas has no WiFi and it sucks down the battery!) in order to get reasonable battery life. With WiFi I get only a few hours, but with WIFi off I still get better than 25 hours!
August 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I think part of the reason for Apple’s past success has been been because they didn’t give in to pressure from customers, retailers, etc and only would release products when they were “ready for prime time.” In the case of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe I think they dropped the ball because they did feel rushed to market. Their string of recent successes may have given them a false sense of infallibility.
August 14th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Is there an echo in here?
August 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am
@reidme – agreed. They likely did feel some false sense of infallibility – but at the same time they set the deadlines themselves. They weren’t forced to release mobileme when they did, and they weren’t forced into iPhone 2.0 – they did that to themselves.
Now they need to work on being open and honest… I don’t think anyone is asking for them to come out and say yes, we know there’s a problem and here’s the fix, but I do think they need to at least acknowledge the issue and tell us they’re working on it.
Its like the Macbook WiFi dropping issue. That went on forever without a single word of acknowledgement from Apple. You knew they were working on it just because there was so many patches to the chipset and the OS, but they never once said anything about it.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I don’t agree with the idea that they weren’t forced to relase the iPhone 2.0/3G. Not entirely, anyway. I think there WAS a LOT of pressure to get the iPhone 3G out along with Enxhange support. It started the day the original iPhone was released. All anyone seemed to be able to talk about was the lack of 3G and the lack of Exchange support.
I dont think Apple HAS to come out and say anything, necessarily. It would be nice, yes, but that’s not how they have ever operated. The difference here, and the reason they don’t have to say anything, is that you KNOW, based on their past history, that they are pretty likely to fix it. With WM devices you were never sure and odds were about even that you’d never see a fix to a given problem – you just had to wait for the next device and buy it when it came out. With Apple we had 4 updates in 9 months to the original iPhone, and now with the 3G and the 2.x OS we’ve already seen one fix within the first month. Because you are pretty sure that they will fix it there’s LESS of a need for them to talk about it.
But it sure would be nice if they did.
August 14th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
This wasn’t so much a rant as it was a plea for communication. There’s been so much press about what is going on with the iPhone 3G, and not all of it has been positive.
I think the best way to combat bad press is with good, solid communication right from the source. It can’t make Apple look bad. They’ve already taken (and continue to take) the hit for MobileMe problems. Why not just fess up and say, “we’re working on the reception problems?” It might go a long way to making them look good.
I know it’s not their standard M.O., but it sure couldn’t hurt…
August 16th, 2008 at 12:28 am
I know it’s not their standard M.O., but it sure couldn’t hurt…
No it surely wouldn’t. The battery on the 3G is utterly terrible! I have 3G turned off, browsing for WiFi networks turned off and still, the battery life is abismal. This is the same way I ran iPhone1 and have never experienced these problems before, even on that model.
Perhaps Apple doesn’t communicate very well but it is an insult to one’s intelligence when AT&T says everything is fine.