As I wrote yesterday, I had decided to return the unit due to the overheating and poor battery life issues I had. I called my local AT&T store, and they told me that if I called Apple, they’d be able to help me a lot faster, so I did. The Apple tech I spoke with had me do a restore (which I had already started – actually, I had started a complete wipe of the phone, but that’s the first step), and set up the iPhone in iTunes as if it was a new phone. I then selectively reinstalled applications which I had downloaded to the phone.
Yesterday afternoon at a little after 2PM, I started using with my freshly-restored, fully-charged iPhone 3Gs. After about 8 hours of intermittent WiFi use, I went to bed with the battery at 65%. I woke up about 8 hours later to find the battery at 55%. This is a very significant improvement over what I had previously seen.
I’m convinced that I did not just restore the same firmware, and that things have changed. Besides the battery life improvement, I noticed that the Mail application is slightly different. Prior to yesterday’s wipe, I experienced “three taps to delete” in Mail (click the message, click the trashcan, click “Yes I really want to delete this darned message”). After the restore, I observed that the trashcan deletes with one tap, and also it animates! It was not doing this before. Or, if it was, I deleted dozens of emails and never noticed this, but still, the additional confirmation is gone, so something changed.
So, my theory is that I am not alone, and that there may be many of us with brand new iPhones and old firmware. I’m not sure why iTunes identified it as “current” and indicated that nothing changed when I did the restore, but I am much, much happier with my iPhone right now.
And I’m keeping it.
At least ’til the end of my 30 day trial period. Then we’ll just have to see.
The personal blog of Peter Nikolaidis