Sprint Will Join AT&T, Verizon as a Carrier of the iPhone

August 23rd, 2011 · 36 notes · #apple #iphone #3g #3gs #4 #5 #4g #lte #at&t #sprint #verizon

Wall Street Journal columnists Joanna Lublin and Spencer Ante produced a joint report claiming Sprint Nextel Corp. will be providing Apple’s next iPhone, due this Fall, alongside Verizon and AT&T. The report indicates that Sprint will begin selling the presumed iPhone 5 in mid-October, which further conflicts numerous reports citing a September release. 

Sprint, who’s 52 million subscribers seems whimsical against AT&T’s 99 million and Verizon’s 106 million, will benefit substantially from the device, as they have not had a flagship phone to rally behind except for HTC’s Evo 4G, which has been deemed a failure by many.

If true, Sprint’s addition of the iPhone to their lineup will satisfy investors further after the company has improved many crucial business elements such as customer service, advertising, and brand image. However, investors have hammered the telecommunications company for failing to add subscribers.

Sprint will begin selling hundreds of thousands of iPhone units, as Verizon and AT&T have sold 4.5 million and 7.2 million iPhone models since the beginning of the 2011.

The Edge Experiment ✎

June 16th, 2010 · 4 notes · #Apple #iPhone #3G #3GS #Edge #Evo #4G #Battery #Life

This is a long overdue post, but better now than never. For those of you who own an iPhone 3GS, or even an iPhone 3G, the battery life is not what we would like it to be. And if you know someone with a Blackberry there’s no doubt you get teased when you make a comment about your battery life nearing death. 

Before I go to sleep I plug in my iPhone to the wall charger. When I wake up at 6:30 AM, I unplug it. Between 6:30 and 7:10 the phone is in constant use over a Wifi network. According to Apple’s website, I’m supposed to get 9 hours of battery life over Wifi. At 7:10 my iPhone’s battery percentage is around 90%. In 40 minutes I lost 10% battery life. Let’s do some math. 40*10 = 400. 400/60 = 6.66-. So Apple’s website is inaccurate, right? 

Kind of.

When Apple, or any other company for that matter, advertises battery life they want to give the best impression possible of that battery life. That being said, there is a little bit of arm twisting involved. When a company shows you the number of hours there are a number of questions that arise. Is that the battery life with brightness at full? Is that the battery life for watching a movie? Is that the battery life for standby? Fortunately for us, Apple is not that bad. This is how I view their battery life claims: “You can get this much battery life out of the device if you use it in the correct way.”

So what am I saying? I’m saying that many of us, especially bloggers and technology savvy people, don’t use our iPhones like a normal person would. What’s normal? Normal is not constantly visiting websites, scrolling up on the Tweetie timeline every few seconds, multitasking and backgrounding applications, and streaming videos on the road. Think about it. Chances are that if you’re reading this you do at least one of those on your iPhone and you’ve complained about battery life. 

After realizing this I accepted the fact that the iPhone’s battery life is not suited for me and I would have to live with it. I constantly changed my brightness settings to make sure it would last me through the day, but I turned off 3G networking. Speed is important to me.

But what’s the real difference between 3G and Edge? A lot actually. 3G can download 14 mbit/s and Edge gets 236.8 kbit/s. That’s a huge gap in download speeds. I decided that switching to Edge would not be a good because I blog, tweet, and sometimes stream music from Last.fm in the background on my iPhone. Edge would no doubt disrupt my mobile life.

Or would it?

It wasn’t until this past Spring break that I took the leap into Edge networking. We were vacationing in Santa Cruz, California and roaming around the Bay Area. We went to Big Sur, San Francisco, UCSC, Berkeley, Stanford, Palo Alto, and Marin County within a couple of days by car. It was hours and hours of travel time. On the first trip to UCSC my battery dipped below 20% 3 hours into the whole thing on 3G. The next day I decided I would switch to Edge for the remainder of the trip and blog my thoughts. 

What I found was pretty, well, profound. There is a huge speed gap between 3G and Edge, but it’s nothing you will notice in applications like Tweetie, Last.fm, Mail, even the App Store for that matter. I was only able to spot a difference in Safari with web browsing, but only when I was visiting the non-mobile version of a website.

My battery life improved drastically. To Big Sur and back from Santa Cruz (roughly 3 hours) my battery life percentage was 68%. That’s right. 68%. The whole ride there I was refreshing Tweetie constantly, texting, browsing websites, and watching some of DRBUK’s videos on YouTube. 

There is a speed difference, it’s very clear. But switching to Edge on a long car ride or during a busy day can really affect how much time, and therefore efficiency, you can get out of your iPhone.