Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

For the past 3 days, I have taken my shiny new iPhone 3G through its paces. I’ve messed around with WiFi, GPS, push mail (receiving corporate mail through Exchange) & personal email, applications, web browsing, youtube, etc. Suffice to say, I’ve done it all.

Now that my iPhone can proudly boast 3G speeds, I intend to make the above list the norm of my everyday use for my poor iPhone. Unfortunately, however, this is going to reek havoc on the batter and already has. I have had to consistently keep charging my iPhone for the past 3 days and have actually seen the 10% battery warning twice already. This can be a serious problem for me since this is how I intend to use the gadget moving forward.

After giving it some though, I came to the conclusion that you can’t actually fault the battery itself here. The battery is not weak, it’s quite capable (and easier to replace!). The problem is that the device is really amazing. It’s so amazing in fact, it has replaced several reasons of why I would have to use my laptop and may actually render my PSP a paperweight. I exaggerate a bit but for good reason. See, the iPhone is so damn conveniently small, so I am able to fore-go any extra functionality I may be losing in my laptop and PSP. I don’t need to play GTA4 when I have free games in the app store on a gadget that also functions as a phone/pda/web browser/multimedia hub/steam iron.

With all that said, as convergence devices begin to, umm, converge (?) more devices, where does that leave battery technology? A laptop is ok if it only has 3 hours of battery life. A phone is fine with the same. A PSP doesn’t really need more than 3 hours. But what happens when you combine all three of these devices and then some? Three hours just isn’t enough when you can use one device to accomplish the tasks of many.