Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
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Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
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Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
You need to be a member of Art Fair Insiders to add comments!
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Larry
I have purchased the Mophie Battery Pack for my Iphone 4. It doubles the battery life of my phone. I can go all day and night using my phone. I love it. I am a teacher and use my phone for grades, attendance, powerpoints.
It is also nice because you can buy the one with a built in Credit Card Swipe (Intuit). I don't have that because I use Square which fits without having to remove the case. It does add some bulk to the phone as well as weight.
I highly recommend smart phones to anyone that is looking for a new phone. You won't be disappointed.
The issues with the 4S relate to the new iOS 5, which uses more of the radios more of the time.
In an iPhone, you have the cellular radio transceiver (the phone), a GPS transceiver, a wireless transceiver for when you're near a network, the Bluetooth transceiver. The location services use both the cellular system and the GPS to triangulate your position, for any app that uses location services. Likewise, the notification services use location in some instances. Taken in aggregate, all of these radios running at once use up a fair amount of juice. More than the old phones, primarily because the software allows third party apps to use location services to trigger notifications, to help you find the closest service, and things like that.
Ever notice that when you have location services enabled and you do a Google search for a chain restaurant, say, Chipotle, it will return the closest matches to your location, based on the GPS and the cellular network? Smart, but it uses juice.
Weather radar uses location too. The new Weather Channel app will track you via GPS and add a point to the radar map, if you turn it on in your preferences.
Apple's new reminder service can trigger a reminder when you get to a certain place, like your office, or the Home Depot down the road. It uses location services to do that, and it will keep the GPS cycling to check your position, until you get to the trigger point. That burns juice.
I have notifications turned on for CNN Financial News. It pings me several times a day with top news stories. To get them, it has to be connected to my home wireless network, or to the 3G network. That takes juice.
Push email, like Apple's iCloud mail service (dot.mac or mobile me, depending on when you got in) has to poll the network periodically to get your mail as soon as it's posted to the server. That takes juice, too.
The bottom line is that the more you use location-based services, notifications, and push email, the more the various radios need to be functioning all the time. Turning off some of these functions, or minimizing their use will maximize battery time.
Apple is aware of these issues. They've been reported in the tech media since the phone was released, with the concurrent release of iOS 5, which is more at fault than the hardware. They've promised a fix to the OS. When? Hopefully, soon. In the meantime, turning off any location-based notifications will help.
The battery does drain faster than the older models. It's a fact. I haven't had a chance to try the 4S at a show, but I suspect it wouldn't last the day with even normal use. I doubt you'd get 4-5 hours of talk time without recharging, UNLESS you turn off some of the other radios. Turning off the wireless function so it doesn't seek when you're away from home is an old trick, and it helps. Turning off Bluetooth if you're not using it is also a power-saving trick. Of course, if you use a hands-free headset, that may not be an option.
After all that, I love the 4S. Siri is not perfect. But some of the interface improvements are definitely worth it. The camera is awesome, for a phone. And there's an app for practically everything. I have yet to update my laptop to iCloud, so I can't speak to how that works. It works fine with mobile me, but that is slated to go away next June. I'll have to update by then, I suppose. But that requires an upgrade to Mac OS Lion, which I don't run yet. More work. More hassle. It'll be worth it though.
One other thing: I'm on AT&T, which is experienced with the onslaught of data requests from iPhone and iPad devices. They've finally got their network working fairly well to deal with the increased demand. This isn't the case with Verizon, yet, and I'm guessing that Sprint will have issues too. Lots of iPhone users equals heavy network traffic, which if the network doesn't have enough repeaters to deal with the load, will cause dropped calls, spotty data or slow data, and in some instances, no service at all, even in a normally good service area.
One example of this. The University of Michigan stadium hosts 110,000 people on Saturday afternoons for Wolverine football in the autumn. For the past three years, AT&T users have not been able to make calls, or even send a text inside the stadium, partly because of the data overload. This year, they finally fixed the issue, and you can send text, even pictures, during the game. They learned, they adapted. This year, Verizon network users, even those on Blackberry or Android, experienced the same issues as AT&T users did previously. No texts, no calling out, delayed messaging. Verizon did not have enough hardware to deal with the increase in smart phone traffic once iPhone users started to clog the stream.
Assume that this will happen with Sprint, too. Some shows like Ann Arbor, or St. James, have heavy data usage during shows, and that may make it hard or impossible to use the Square, or Intuit's GoPayment, or do anything that requires a good signal. Until the networks catch up to the user base in a given location, and understand how to deal with peak traffic, this will be as big an issue as battery time.
Hope that's some help. Sorry so lengthy.
:-)
I don't have a 'smart phone' yet (so I guess mine is a dumb phone) but I see one in my future so I try to pay attention to information about them. Interesting that the forum I checked immediately prior to seeing your question Larry, had this entry, maybe it will help: http://macgroup.org/blog/2011/11/02/magic-power/
Bernie Doran
I got an I-Phone 4S so I could dump my cash guzzling merchant services account. Since then, I have been using it extensively and reading about all the features and apps. It is great!! It is amazing what I can do with this device. The Siri voice app is worth it alone. If your phone contract is up now or soon, you may want to get it. You could wait for the I-phone 5, which has been rumored to be released in June 2012. Of course, all the speculation about the I-phone 5's being released in the summer of 2011, then September, then October was wrong.
But, that is not answering your question. I don't have a reference to compare it to, but, it seems that the battery drains pretty fast. It certainly lasts longer than a laptop. It's supposed to have 8 hours of continuous use, which seems to be right. I hook it up to the charger every night and when I am not using it. We'll see what happens when I take it to a show and have to use it all day without a charge. Since I am a novice with this phone, I did some online research and learned some things about extending the battery life. I didn't know that when you use an app, it stays on after you stop using it. So, I had over 30 apps on at one time, which is like leaving the lights on in every room all day and night. Now, I, periodically during the day, go in and shut the programs off. I've turned off contact syncing with my email accounts and as many notifications as possible. This seems to help a lot. If you turn off needless things, you shouldn't have a problem.
Here are a couple of articles you could look at:
http://www.macworld.com/article/163200/2011/10/troubleshoot_iphone4...
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/01/8582804-how-to-exte...