Apple’s bringing 3G to the iPhone-table, there’s no doubt about that. But, just how did Apple manage to solve the battery-drain issues that they claimed kept the current-generation iPhone from sporting a 3G radio? By allowing the user to disable 3G data access for those times when super-speedy data speeds (or more battery uptime) are needed, of course.
There are presumably some technical improvements to the internals that will get the 3G iPhone closer to Steve Jobs’s goal of getting “battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range.” But, we’re likely not going to see the 3G iPhone surfing the 3G waves for the same 6 hours of continuous use on the current generation iPhone.
The iPhone OS 2.0 beta 5 firmware has shown that the 3G iPhone will offer the user the option to turn off 3G data connectivity in the name of longer battery life. We imagine that one could turn on 3G data for actively surfing image-heavy webpages. The 3G data setting can be disabled to force the iPhone to use the more power-friendly EDGE data connection for automatic email checking, stocks, and RSS reading.
[Via: ChronicProductions]