Apple investigates iPhone battery life, MMS from AT&T this week

Jonny Evans
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September 21, 2009
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AT&T has confirmed MMS messaging will come to supporting iPhones from September 25, while Apple is engaging in an extensive survey to try to understand reported problems with battery life problems in the device.

Apple has begun contacting iPhone customers who complain about poor battery life on their device following installation of iPhone 3.1. Customer care operatives are making contact with 11 questions, focusing on such things as push email, WIFI, Bluetooth and which apps a user uses.

Customers are also being offered Battery Life logging software, which gathers information about their product usage and battery life. The application - seemingly distributed using the Ad Hoc system - also gathers extensive data logs on this, which are then shared with Apple.

In related iPhone news, AT&T announced the MMS would be switched on from this Friday late last week. The carrier says it had to upgrade its cell phone towers and data centres before it could enable the service on the iPhone.

AT&T spokesman, John Britton, said,"Our highest priority has been to ensure the best possible customer experience with MMS, This is how long it's taken to complete this process."

Comments (9)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | September 21, 2009 - 4:14am

All AT&T do is have to allow it to transfer across their network, as they do for all other phones.

I don't buy that MMS traffic could be so substantial for a single brand of phone that it would warrant upgrading towers, when internet traffic didn't.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | September 21, 2009 - 6:50am

MMS is a messy protocol that requires a lot of network tweaking. It's not treated as data just like anything else. This is part of the reason why AT&T and Apple didn't enable it in the first place... they were hoping to phase it out and get email or IM to be the standard.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | September 22, 2009 - 8:52am

With that being said you have to realise that there is what? 10 million iPhones in the US. A majority of which are on the Att network. That's a huge jump. Plus. Were all gonna send a picture the second we get it. That's at least 9.5 million pictures at once.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | September 21, 2009 - 6:13am

I don't think the logging software is Ad Hoc-like, it seems to be more like the provisioning profile tethering hack.

Does anyone know where we can get it?

TalkinMan (not verified) | September 21, 2009 - 10:01am

I ran into a battery life problem that didn't stop until I bought a new cable. The end sockets on the cables are just terrible.

RU (not verified) | September 21, 2009 - 3:48pm

my iphone crashes about 2-3 times a day after installing 3.1....

gill | September 29, 2009 - 11:53am

From what I hear people are not quite satisfied with this kind of batteries. I think these battery life investigations are necessary, Apple needs to stay on higher standards.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | September 30, 2009 - 3:41pm

my fucking phone is dying like a bitch now at least twice a day. What the fuck.

9to5Mac Noo (not verified) | September 30, 2009 - 9:33pm

Mine was doing the exact same thing. Plug it in and click restore and it fixes it. It died 3 time yesterday. Today been using it all day and it's half battery