Your 3G battery guzzling as well?

Welcome to 3G and GPS. More importantly, welcome to your new sucky battery.

Its really not the batteries fault, its the added power of the phone. In fact, some people say this is one of the best 3G phones on the market for good battery life.

The bottom line is this. If you want to use all the new toys and do not want to charge during the day, I have bad news. There is a good chance this will not happen.

So, for my longer days, I turn 3G off and put the screen at 50% brightness. Yeah, that stinks, but, better safe than sorry.

I also now have chargers in my car and backpack.

A word about the battery itself. It will get better. The first week is the worse. You can help condition your battery by letting it drain to the point it shuts down then giving it a full charge without unplugging. If you can, do this three times in a row. This will teach your battery its power range.

Today I flew to Louisiana. My goal was to see if I could use the inflightpower to tinker with my iPhone on a plane.

Overall, the product kinda sucked. I will need to go on a few more flights, but, the thing works on charging with loud volume. I found a dance station and in the beginning it worked. It does not charge. It just keeps the charge where it is.

The problem was many fold. Some apps do not show the power bar so you have no idea when the inflight lost its connection. It also would disconnect when a DJ came on leaving me to tinker and re-trigger it.

I am going to see if other planes might work better, but, right now its just too much work to be viable. Even with tinkering I hit the 20% warning on the second leg of my flight.

Edit. Other planes do work better. You will keep the unit on and keeping charge much longer if the entertainment system has that annoying low buzz. Just turn the volume up and take advantage of it. However, some apps will not show when you battery is no longer hooked up to power supply. So, I still find myself constantly clicking back to the main screen to see if its still connected to the inflightpower.

So, I popped this in:

http://us.kensington.com/html/15462.html

I cannot say yay enough about this. It charged me from 20% to full charge in a little over an hour. There was still some juice left on it even when it was done.

I will be adding this to my bag as well.

http://us.kensington.com/html/15458.html

My guess is I can have 4 hours of plane time using the larger charger. Look at that. A rhyme! Sorry, long 3 days.

I cannot recommend the Kensington enough. I might also give into this item as well:

http://www.mophie.com/collections/batteries

If I do, I will report back. (look below)

And, there is the report. The Mophie is great! The only thing I worry about is the fact the entire iPhone is not protected with this case. I sadly am a klutz and need to be really careful when I use the Mophie.

And, to end, some battery suggestions from Apple:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html