Apple iPhone 3G Cell Phone Review - Battery Life

The iPhone 3G's talk time is pretty good for a 3G device, at just short of six hours. Music playback time is not as impressive and neither is web browsing time. Perhaps the most important piece of information we found is that your screen is more of a power hog than the 3G network. As such we recommend you turn down screen brightness if you want the iPhone 3G's battery to last. For information about how we conduct our battery tests see this article.

Call Time (7.0)
The iPhone 3G lasted five hours fifty minutes in our test of call time. This is significantly above average and is the best time amongst our comparison phones, as you can see below. We're quite happy to see this time, it's almost a full hour longer than Apple indicated the iPhone would last under 3G and is amongst the best results we've seen from a 3G device, where the network is incredibly battery hungry. This should make those who make a lot of calls feel a bit more comfortable about purchasing the iPhone 3G. It's not going to die on you if you make a few hours worth of calls during the day, although if you mix that with a lot of other usage we can't promise the phone won't be dead by mid-afternoon. We ran a total of three call time tests on the iPhone 3G using the 3G network. The results of our other two tests were five hours thirty-nine minutes and five hours twenty-two minutes. This means you'll definitely see some variance here of up to half an hour, but you should consistently get over five hours of call time.

Call Time (min)

Music Playback (7.03)
The iPhone 3G lasted for nine hours forty-six minutes in our music playback test. You can see below that this is above average, but falls well short of several of our comparison handsets, including the Samsung Instinct and LG Dare. In fact the only comparison phone it beat out was the Nokia N95. It's also far short of the twenty-four hour playback time that Apple claims, although this may be due to differences in testing procedure. For our music test we play back music through the loud speaker at maximum volume. If Apple was using a lower volume or running the test with headphones this may explain the difference.

Music Playback Time (min)

Web Browsing (5.06)
The iPhone 3G lasted four hours thirteen minutes in our web browsing test. You can see below that this is slightly less than average and the only comparison phones that it beat out was the Samsung Instinct, who's browsing time was particularly terrible. Web browsing on the iPhone 3G is impacted by two major drains on the battery, first is the use of AT&T's power hungry 3G network. The second is that the screen is on for the entirety of the test. You can see in our explanation below that this has a significant impact.

Web Browsing Time (min)

The web browsing test on the iPhone 3G was one of the most vexing we've encountered. Initially we got results ranging from two hours forty-two minutes all the way up to six hours forty-nine minutes. That last result was an outlier we threw out, but we still had a lot of variation. It turned out that the variable was the screen brightness. We left the iPhone 3G to adjust its brightness automatically, as our standard is to level settings in default. It turns out that the variance between phones seemed to have a significant impact on the battery life. As such we ran our browsing tests again using a fixed screen brightness, which was the brightness right after resetting the phone, about one-third of the way up the bar. Fixing the screen brightness finally allowed us to get consistent results, with four tests at about four hours.

The lesson here is that your screen brightness will have a major impact on the iPhone 3G's battery life, no matter what you are doing. If you turn it up very high expect to see some major reductions in battery life. In fact we recommend you turn off the automatic adjustment and just choose the lowest brightness you find acceptable.

Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. Apple's stated idle time for the iPhone 3G is 300 hours.

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