The WhiteHack Blog

On Wednesday night I charged my iPhone, I knew that I was probably going to be using it heavily on thursday (chasing people to fix our kitchen after a slight chip pan incident). On Thursday I made the calls (only a couple – not as many as I thought I would be making), checked my email over a 3G connection a couple of times, and sent one text message.

At some point in the afternoon it died a death.

No response from it what so ever, I noticed this as usually I connect it to my car stereo via a cable for the music, and via bluetooth for the actual phone calls, but I decided to listen to Scott Mills on Radio One instead. I did notice that I did not get the usual connection message to show that the bluetooth car kit was connected.

Try as I could through pressing the power button and the home button nothing would happen. It certainly did not suggest it was charging.

Upon getting home I connected it to my PC and received a red battery indicator with a lightning bolt underneath. I thought this was odd as I had hardly used it all day.

I unplugged it a few hours later and it showed a full charge, I turned off location services, wifi (though as you’ll see from this previous post, wifi has not worked for a while), email push, and the 3G. My wife and I retired to bed after Celebrity Big Brother, and I set the alarm.

My wife work me up just before 8am “Honey, we are late”, strange I thought, I remember setting the alarm. Looked at my iPhone and it’s dead again.

About 9 hours had passed and the battery had drained completely again. Impressive.

It’s out of warranty, and having a new battery will cost £55 to have fitted, which is not the same cost as purchasing a new iPhone, but it’s not exactly cheap either. Last time I took it to the Apple store I was told that to get the iPhone wifi working would cost £140, as although there are no marks on it, nor have the water indicators been tripped, it was classed as “dropped or water damaged”, at that point I thought iI would wait for Vodafone to get the 3GS, which was a couple of months away, but now for me to get a working iPhone will cost nearly £200 in all, or pay Vodafone to upgrade (about £89 + upgrading my contract by another £15 per month – which over two years works out at £360, add on the extra £89 and thats over £400).

Its only 13 days out of the years warranty, and the battery life is roughly that of a Mayfly.

I had a MacBook a few years ago, and the battery on that had a lifespan of about an hour after a year. I did not use that heavily either.

Before you comment about letting the battery fully drain and then charge it, yes I have done this. I learnt this a long long time ago, and do this with everything.

So now I am getting very fed up with the longevity of Apple products, and their business model which seems to be “high cost, short life”.

It’s true that out of all the smart phones around the iPhone has the greatest number of apps, but how many do people actually use? Probably not many. I want a phone to make calls, play music, have a decent ssh client, and take a few pictures when I am not carrying my digital SLR around.

So instead of spending another £200 on a peice of technology which although is nicely designed and has a large number of applications, I refuse to give any more money to Apple, I have zero faith in the iPhone now, and unless you want to give more money to Apple in the form of AppleCare, after a year you are shit out of luck if there is a problem. Even with the years warranty they can still claim that its been dropped or water damaged (when it clearly hasn’t) when the wifi craps out.

That’s it, I’m done. No more iPhone, but I am still stuck with some songs in iTunes DRM format, so I’ll have to remedy that shortly.

So, whats next? Given that I completely loath Windows Mobile (and have done since it came out), and I am not that impressed by Blackberries (unless using one for work), not many options ar left (apart from Symbian), apart from the increasingly popular Android.

After much deliberation (well a couple of hours, the choice was easy), I have opted for the Acer Liquid A1, which runs Android 1.6, and is based around a 1GHz Snapdragon cpu (Qualcomm 8250, underclocked to 768MHz in the interest of battery life), comes with a 3.5-inch WVGA display, 5-megapixel camera, support for HSDPA 7.2Mbit/s and A-GPS, its memory (256MB RAM, 512MB ROM) is expandable to include another 32GB using microSD cards. It’s an impressive device, which very importantly has an easily replaceable battery.

So roll on Android, goodbye Apple.

Stay tuned for a review in the next few days.