I’ve posted about this before in comments to this post, but I think it deserves a seperate update post:

1 month and a few weeks in, I’m finding the iPhone 3G battery life to still be sufficient for what I use my phone for. There is, however, noticible difference in battery left at end of day if I don’t micromanage (ie turn off/on) the relevant chipsets on the phone. My major gripe is there is no Office/Work/etc profiles to control what is turned on… Doing it manually can be a pain. Right now I have the below setup:

At home: Need Bluetooth, Wifi on, and 3g off (non 3g area)

At office/travelling on train: Need Wifi off, BT off, 3g on

In car: BT on, 3g off, wifi off

Providing I change settings as above, in my usage - yesterday I got (starting coming off charge at 6:30am):

1. 1.5-2 hours of mp3 playback (during half of this was also surfing web on train (mix of 2g/3g)
2. 1 hour of websurfing and email (I have 2 email accounts, one push, one checking hourly) via 3g
3. One 2 hour phone call (2g)

At end of day (midnight), I still had ~ 40% of the battery free and  I realised this isn’t that bad.  Without micromanaging the battery the day before, I had 5% (an estimate) - with an almost identical usage pattern.

In comparison my old Nokia N73 (also 3g) could only handle 2 hours of intensive web surfing/video use - a few more hours if only being used for mp3 playback… and it had a FAR smaller screen. The N73 also ran out of battery with a just being on standby and a 3 hour call in fact…

I think peoples expectations with the iPhone are that it’ll perform the same as their old phone and this is the problem. On their old phone they didn’t spend a minimum 2 hours of the day websurfing, emailing etc (and it has a smaller screen!).   They were, in many cases just using it for calls. My experience on Three with the N73 made me know that a 3g phone with very intensive use does need 2 charges a day. This surprisingly isn’t the case with iPhone for me - at least right now.

My only problem is I may have to get a Morphie and a second plug-in charger to keep me going in the future if I continue increasing my phone usage every day.

iPhone 3G users - have you come to same conclusion as me - in that the battery life issue is mainly due to increased usage of a converged device - not the phone having awful battery life?   Does yours last the day without the micromanagement I do?