CrunchGear

You know I love it and want to marry it, but the battery issue must be dealt with and the only thing I can imagine Apple will do is release a new bit of firmware. My biggest fear, however, is that this is a design flaw that will require a full recall.

WTF? I have no idea how you’ve come to that conclusion that the battery issue “must be dealt with”. How is that a “design flaw”? Apple will do no recall unless the things explode. Have you used any other 3G phone (per your article I can only conclude - no)? Battery issue is “short” on all of them. The question is it “good enough” for a phone? If your opinion is “no” - great mention that - but to state its a “design flaw” is stretching it.

(Plus - guess what!?!? you can turn 3G off! but of course mentioning that would of distracted you from your irrational conclusion)

He wasn’t writing a comparison to other devices, it was a review of the iPhone 3G. I see what you’re saying, but I get the feeling that most people interested in the iPhone aren’t going to even consider other 3G devices out there.

BATTERY ISSUE FIXED

Simply FORCE a RESTORE in iTunes. The wrong firmware is in the orginal 3G phones. iTunes does not tell you that the firmware is incorrect at this time so do not bother the CHECK for UPDATES.

A FORCED RESTORE downloads the correct firmware from Apple and updates the 3G iPhone to the exact same version 2.0 (5A347)that is in the last batch to be sold this week.

In most cases it isn’t worth trying to pull in a backup of your iPhone as most of these are corrupted. Just set it up as a new iPhone all over again and re sync to iTunes. You should notice that the battery issue is fixed immediately after a full charge an a useage cycle. After that try to keep the batttery charged as much as possible as it will last longer. Use the iPhone when connected to AC or on a car charger if at all possible to avoid using a portion of a discharge cycle. The iPhone battery has a life that is good for about 400 full discharge cycles.

The wrong firmware is iPhone firmware 2.0 (5A345)
The correct firmware is 2.0 (5A347)

BATTERY ISSUE FIXED

Simply FORCE a RESTORE in iTunes. The wrong firmware is in the orginal 3G phones. iTunes does not tell you that the firmware is incorrect at this time so do not bother the CHECK for UPDATES.

A FORCED RESTORE downloads the correct firmware from Apple and updates the 3G iPhone to the exact same version 2.0 (5A347)that is in the last batch to be sold this week.

In most cases it isn’t worth trying to pull in a backup of your iPhone as most of these are corrupted. Just set it up as a new iPhone all over again and re sync to iTunes. You should notice that the battery issue is fixed immediately after a full charge an a useage cycle. After that try to keep the batttery charged as much as possible as it will last longer. Use the iPhone when connected to AC or on a car charger if at all possible to avoid using a portion of a discharge cycle. The iPhone battery has a life that is good for about 400 full discharge cycles.

The wrong firmware is iPhone firmware 2.0 (5A345)
The correct firmware is 2.0 (5A347)

This was a poorly written review that gave little insight into what to expect from the new iPhone.

A hardware recall? Come on, Crunchgear. You are the sister of Techcrunch, get your shit together and post better, and more believable reviews. This one was quite bad.

I hope that the Push Notification API doesn’t hurt battery life much. That was the point of Apple federating all pushes through them so individual apps don’t need to maintain open connections for pushes.

I’m pretty sure that the push notifications will be based on specially formatted text messages, similar to how visual voicemail works. If true, it’ll probably affect your battery life only as much as the additional text messages would, and perhaps less so if you could tweak the notification settings for each app (i.e. don’t turn on the backlight, etc).

When it can,

1. Cut and paste
2. Take full motion video
3. Have better battery life
4. Use A2DP over bluetooth for wireless headsets
5. Have a real keyboard
6. Be more open to “other” music services
7. Not require ATT service
8. When you can switch away from apps without losing them
9. etc.

My current phone is all of the above and more.

You love it and want to marry it? Isn’t this the same sort of insanity that drives perfectly nice women to marry convicts on death row?

When all those things are implemented you’ll have more reasons why you wont. I hate people like you. You’ve never tried it, you think you know they are important, but you have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve been using an iphone since they first came out and I’ve never needed copy and past. That is such a red herring and gives MS fanbois something to whine about.

I’ll buy an iphone when it:

1. Solves world hunger
2. Has sex with me when I want
3. Can double as a hat
4. etc

You’re current phone is a POS.

Now go away.

Silly me for defining what I need, I should just let Apple tell me what I need, which of coarse is whatever poser pile they happen to be hawking. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid dude, the world needs more Lemmings.

Ah an apple fan boy. Hand your head in shame man. How does one live with themselves. :(

Uhhh.. have you tried the VNC app that’s available for free at the app store? You can basically cut, paste, use excel, word, and photoshop to make your iphone a valentine. check it out. http://www.ismashphone.com/2008/07/vnc-mocha.html

check it out.

And you’d buy anything apple and not even consider that other people may have more of a need than just an ipod with a phone. You’re a douche - now YOU go away

What a moronic response! You assume that we don’t know what we are talking about but guess what asshole! We do. I use my phone 80% of the time to listen to podcasts or music through Bluetooth stereo headsets. The fact that the iPhone is incapable of doing A2DP is a deal breaker for me - period - end of story. Would you buy a device that what you primarily use it for doesn’t work or is not supported? No. Why then do you have your head so far up your ass?

And that non-iPhone wonderphone is????

Not a wonder phone, and could be better, but it does meet my criteria until something better comes along. Ic urrently do the following with it
1. Sync with my companies Outlook exchange.
2. Take full motion videos or still shots when nothing better is available.
3. Keep and access Excel files for daily buisness reasons
4. A2DP Bluetooth music to my office speakers and homw stereo
5. Bluetooth voice/phone in the car.
6. WiFI when at hotels and away from home.
7. Bluetooth contect to my GPS receiver, when driving.
8. Secure digital cards for music / movies / buisness data and alternate setups.
9. Spare battery pack when I am away from the charger for awhile
10. Slide out keyboard.
11. Bluetooth to external keyboard when needed.
12. Take photo’s with my Canon XSI, pull the SD card from the XSI, put it into the phone and email great images.
13. Verizon, better coverage, at least where I live.

Is it the slickest package ever, No. Does it do what I want, yes. Would I look at am iPhone if it had the same or better functionality, of coarse.

VX6800

That non-iPhone wonderphone… Just a guess here, but I’d say anything built by HTC in the past 3 years or thereabouts. Most of tehm have all teh capabilities of the iPhone, plus more. A bunch of them also have proper keyboards that you can use for typing instead of the finicky on-screen one..

A list of smartphones (HTC and otherwise) that are as good or better than the iPhone:

HTC TyTN II
Nokia E90
Nokia N95 (8GB)
HTC TyTN (no GPS, can use bluetooth receiver)
HTC Advantage
Sony Ericsson P1
Sony Ericsson P990
Sony Ericsson xPeria
HTC Touch Diamond/Pro

Plus many, many others that I can’t remember right now.

I love how the iPhone needs a recall and its better than any phone you have ever tested… Flawed thinking buddy.

I’m with blake. Really poor review, barely worth posting. Full of conjecture (esp about Europe and Asia), would love to know when and where the author has travelled…

Can’t comment on whether the iphone is good or not. But I can comment on this sucky review. It sucks. Can we wait for the hype to die down and perhaps get someone to have a second go?

iPhone 3G has yet to show marked improvements over the standard EDGE/Wi-Fi combo that worked so well in the first model

Seriously, you don’t see any speed improvements? Are you sure you’re using it correctly? Are you an intern or something?

The App Store is a collection of applications you have to pay for

Of course, you forgot to mention that a majority of the Apps are free…

i agree.

Yeah, as many have noted, battery life is not stellar with 3G and GPS on (but then, it wasn’t stellar on my AT&T Tilt either, and I recall a lot of Tilt owners looking for modifications to turn off 3G altogether to extend battery life). But with 3G and GPS off, I’m finding the battery life to be significantly better than my original iPhone. The trick does seem to be to turn on 3G when you need it, and turn it off otherwise, which works well for me since I can turn it on when I’m doing some browsing or other intensive use, and leave it off otherwise. But I’m becoming more convinced 3G is worth it; in the worst case scenario where I don’t get good 3G coverage and it falls back to EDGE, it isn’t any worse than my iPhone was, and in fact seems to get a stronger EDGE signal (my old iPhone would get 1 bar of EDGE in my home…. my new one gets 4 bars of EDGE or 1 bar of 3G in my home).

I’m definitely noticing improved 3G speeds. Using the dslreports iphone speed test, I’m now getting anywhere from 700-1150kbps in areas of strong coverage; even when I’m only getting 1 or 2 bars of 3G, the speeds are still solid (dslreports test in the 400-500kbps range…… every now and then it will seem to dip to the 100-200 range, but so far it’s only a few spotty areas where it does that for me). More important than the speed tests of course are just real-world usage, and I am definitely noticing significantly increased load times. This is definitely improving over my first couple of days with it, where even in 5 bar 3G coverage I was not getting very fast 3G performance. Not sure what to attribute that to.

Great review — it cuts to the chase without tedious fanaticism that I’ve seen on other sites — just got my 3G on Tuesday and agree with everything here.

3G in Connecticut is surprisingly good but really a marginal improvement over EDGE for most people.

Biggest bug I’ve seen is that the screen lags big time - especially if you try to go into contacts and make selections. It lags in other areas too but only sporadically.

Today’s the first day I used mine without tethering most of the day to a battery. I’m out of juice at 12:43. My generation one iPhone would have been out around 4pm-ish (or I would have nervously been looking for a charging source)

LOL, turn off 3G. All 3G phones drains like crazy, and those guys have huge thick batteries to compensate, making the device thick like a brick. How Apple got theirs to beat most of them is genius in hardware and OS design.

You likely bought the new iPhone to take advantage of the faster access speeds, so turning it off hardly seems like a good solution.

Maybe the phone should have a sort of auto-sense and turn 3G on and off as and when its needed. Sounds like fairly simple power management to me. To answer my own question, its not so simple. 3G handshaking would add latency to the initial connections.

Of coarse most phones let you change the battery pack to a spare if you need one.

Just like the iPhone. You can get a battery pack or car charger. No need to buy a extra thick fat battery to lug around. Whats your point?

I have a Touch and love it as an iPod. I have an iPhone 3G in my sights and am wondering if I should shelve the Touch and get a 16GB phone that would also be my iPod or do I go with the 8GB and keep the Touch in play? My main concern is battery life on the phone if it’s also used as a music player. Will I constantly be charging it and also killing the battery in the process?

John, I mean this with all due respect… but your articles are usually unimpressive and poorly thought out.

A full recall?? You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to 3G.

How about doing a little research before writing a review next time.

Like, um…. I don’t know. Maybe reading about how the Samsung Blackjack 3G has an even shorter battery life than the iPhone when it’s browsing with a 3G connection. As someone else commented….all 3G phones have battery issues. It’s not related to the iPhone…

Do some homework…

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/07/16/apples_iphone_3g_battery_good_for_about_3_5_hours_of_browsing.html

Christ this is exactly right. If it’s listed as a major feature, it shouldn’t be a huge hassle.

And, as such you would know that the 3G battery life would be as bad on the device with 3G enabled, since your argument is that it is bad on all 3G devices with 3G enabled.

Perhaps a better argument would have been to comapre battery life on the 3G with 3G enabled and again without it enabled. This would have been a much better comparision to battery life overall on the device.

Also, include how battery life on with 3G enabled fairs compared to other 3G devices. It gives the consumer a better sense on how the device performs as a whole, and not just to it’s own predecessor; iphone 1.0.

You might want to reconsider your EDGE/wi-fi argument. You say the combination worked well, and that 3G is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Perhaps you are not aware that 3G networks are usually the standard in Europe and Asia, with the exception of the likes of O2 and Vodafone that still support it. Nor are you stating that 3G would be a better offering than EDGE when you are not near an avaialbe wi-fi hotspot, since wi-fi hotspots are still hard to come by in most areas of this country. No amount of war driving in most areas will allow you to bounce around from access point to access point with out losing a signal at all.

You are correct, however, in pointing out that the software should be smartiner in identifying when you are out of range of 3G, should it be enabled, and that if they are marketing GPS on the phone as an alternative to a Garmin or TomTom, it should have turn by turn GPS. Although, I suspect we most likely will see that change with a firmware update or two.

As far as features, I think you’ll note that Exchange support was higher on the list than cut and paste. For many IT shops, they simply would not go the way of opening IMAP on Exchange due to security reasons. Only if the device had “push” technology thanks to ActiveSync would they support it. Which means more customers/money for Apple, less so for RIM, and a bigger smartphone market share should they add that feature. If cut and paste is on the list, then we’ll see it in a firmware update or two, depending what else has a higher priority than that.

From what I can see, the App Store is still in beta (possibly a perpetual beta - see GMail), meaning not a complete experience as of yet. Only a limited number of developers have been able to get their apps available, when compared to the amount of developers who have downloaded the SDK. I think given enough time we’ll see more mature applications that will give the same functionality or better than those offered through the current App Store, and the Installer.app/jailbreak process. Again, give it time, and we’ll see the App Store out of beta and become a more robust part of the iTunes store experience.

“Finally, finally, finally.” This is a terribly written review I’m sorry John. I’m usually not one to call people out but… seriously? Not only is it days later than the official Engadget and Gizmodo review but it just doesn’t delve into anything in the correct manner and your speculations of a hardware recall are a bit absurd.

I’m used to the high quality of TechCrunch, this is down right lame. Now I realize why engadget and not crunchgear are in my feed reader.

Thanks for the post. I’m old. I’ve been through the bleeding edge too many times to get sucked into the first day vortex. On Monday I updated my 16gb 1st gen to the 2.0 software. The apps are killer. No question. Around Wednesday my old .mac account reappeared. (You gotta wonder what was going down at 1 Infinite loop between 7/11 and 7/16). Now, it’s me. okay. Much better. (Wish I’d owned that url). So here are the 3 things that still suck about the iPhone (1st or 2nd gen)
AT&T
battery
AT&T

I’m going to take your advice and wait a bit before i rush out for the 3g — ‘cuz the real network enhancement, where I live, is called Verizon.

In reply to Zadillo:

Absolutely! I agree 110% with your entire comment, but especially here, “But I’m becoming more convinced 3G is worth it; in the worst case scenario where I don’t get good 3G coverage and it falls back to EDGE, it isn’t any worse than my iPhone was, and in fact seems to get a stronger EDGE signal (my old iPhone would get 1 bar of EDGE in my home…. my new one gets 4 bars of EDGE or 1 bar of 3G in my home).”

I went on a trip the Saturday following the release from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Tampa Florida and mind you the majority of the trip takes you through “the sticks,” so t speak. In the center of the state where 3G coverage does not reach and EDGE is even on it’s last leg, my GPS worked wonderfully in sparsely populated areas and agricultural towns. When I got to Tampa, I was on the last bar of 3G, which somehow was very fast EDGE quality. And then when my iPhone switched to EDGE completely somehow all five bars on EDGE was faster than five bars on my 2G iPhone.

As far as battery life, I will say that over all I do wish I could go without a charge up at mid-day with 3G on. However, I am aware that what Apple presented at the WWDC keynote was a comparison to other 3G phones–in that regard the iPhone stands out. But in general, all 3G phones suck in terms of long periods of mobility + browser + push usage. The latter aside, the iPhone still shines among it’s peers.

Finally, if there were to be a recall–which I SERIOUSLY doubt–it would be amazing and bad at the same time. Great that a physical battery improvement would be available, but bad that Apple had to do a recall of millions of iPhone 3Gs.