Has Apple changed the iPhone battery?

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 19 June 2007 09:25

Your IT - Mobility

Apple now says the iPhone's battery is good for up to eight hours of talk time or 250 hours on standby. But what the company isn't saying is how this has been achieved.

While CEO Steve Jobs was explicit about the change to the screen - "We've also upgraded iPhone's entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity" - it's not clear what's changed when it comes to battery life.

You could draw a fine distinction and claim that saying "We've also upgraded" rather than "Also, we've upgraded" implies that the battery has been changed, but that's drawing a long bow.

Instead, we suspect that the battery capacity is unchanged from the January announcement, and that one of two things has happened.

Firstly, it's quite possible that the only thing that's changed is Apple's estimate of how long a charge will last. It makes a lot more sense to under promise and over deliver, and commentators have pointed out that is a classic Jobs/Apple strategy.

The phrasing of Apple's announcement - "iPhone will deliver significantly longer battery life when it ships on June 29 than was originally estimated when iPhone was unveiled in January" - tends to support this interpretation, though this argument suffers from the same limitation as the above analysis of Jobs' choice of words.

Now that samples of the phone have been field-tested by some more or less 'normal users', Apple is in a better position to fine-tune its estimates of battery life.

Please read on for our 'iPhone Battery Conspiracy Theory.'