iPhone: Improved Battery + New Screen = Caution Ahead

Apple opened its bag of surprises this morning when CEO Steve Jobs announced in a press release that the iPhone will feature a much improved battery life, as well as a more scratch resistant touch-screen.

The iPhone will now feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback. (Compared to 5 hours talk time/internet use/video playback, and 16 hours of audio playback before.)

With 8 hours of talk time, and 24 hours of audio playback, iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can’t wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.

In addition, Apple’s PR department released a competitive data chart, comparing the iPhone’s tech-specs with other popular smart-phones.

One should note the small-print that Apple posted on the official iPhone tech-spec website, however:

Talk Time: Testing conducted by Apple in May and June 2007 using preproduction iPhones and software. All talk time testing was done connected to a 1900MHz network. All settings were default except: Call Forwarding was turned on; the WiFi feature Ask to Join Networks was turned off. Battery life depends on the cellular network, location, signal strength, feature configuration, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPhone units; actual results may vary.

Call forwarding was turned on? According to Wikipedia call forwarding allows an incoming call to a called party, which would be otherwise unavailable, to be redirected to a mobile telephone or other telephone number.

It is safe to assume that most iPhone users will not have call forwarding turned on. On the other hand, users will most likely leave the “Ask to Join Networks” feature turned on and have less than optimal signal strength while on the road.

Therefore, we would like to caution our readers to get too excited about these new battery specs. Your iPhone-uptime will probably be much less in the real world.

Either way, a good day for iPhone fans. Now if they would only up the memory to 8GB and 16GB respectively…

Update 3:16pm: It seems as if we’re not the only ones questioning Apple’s new and improved iPhone battery life. CNN also has a piece on this issue, quoting an analyst:

Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, sounded a note of skepticism about Apple’s latest battery times. In an interview Monday, he said sources had indicated the iPhone’s active-use battery life could be closer to four or five hours of heavy use — similar to the battery life of a typical ” smart phone.”