Complaints about poor battery life with the iPhone's 3.1 OS appear to be on Apple's radar.
AppleCare helpdesk is reportedly sending out questionnaires to people who have been complaining about the problem on Apple's discussion boards, The iPhone Blog reports. Several questions focus on things that all iPhone owners should ask themselves, such as whether push notifications, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are turned on. However, one of the questions asks whether power is legitimately lower, or whether it just appears that way by the battery indicator.
Finally, the correspondence from Apple includes a program that enables battery life logging on the iPhone. After installing the program, iPhone users are advised to sync with their computers after a few days, and then delete the program once the battery information is sent to Apple.
So it seems Apple is at least acknowledging one problem with the iPhone's latest operating system update. Other reported troubles include random freezes, disappearance of 3G connectivity in known coverage areas, broken GPS and a problem dubbed "coma," in which the phone fails to wake from sleep mode. Though not a bug, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 also stopped working without permission from a network's IT administrator.
In other words, it hasn't been a smooth upgrade.
iPhone 3.1 adds a few neat features, including a "Genius" function for finding similar apps to the ones you've downloaded and Genius mixes of your iTunes music. The update also lets you download ringtones wirelessly and organize the layout of apps from within iTunes on a computer. Other new features let you save trimmed video files as new clips instead of discarding the old ones and downloading video files from e-mail or MMS into the phone's camera roll.
But none of those upgrades are worth it, in my opinion, until some of the above mentioned bugs get squashed. Hopefully the battery isn't the only thing Apple is looking at for a 3.2 upgrade.
