IPhone 5 battery life issues - covered under CGA by Telecom ?

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › IPhone 5 battery life issues - covered under CGA by Telecom ?

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#720734 21-Nov-2012 13:13

joutei: I for one find it sad that a network carrier should get blamed for the manufacturers fault.

Anyway, realistically speaking smartphones mostly give you around 8 - 10 hours.
If you expect more for a $1000 phone then that is something you should bring up with apple.

Even the new Nokia Lumia 920 baterry life isnt impressive.

From what I understand, the 'network carrier' is the 'retailer', and under NZ law they must sort out problems with the product. It's not sad at all, it is the law. They can of course choose not to be a retailer and not sell phones to consumers.

sbiddle

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#720737 21-Nov-2012 13:15

AndrewMac: It may be a manufacturing problem but it was purchased from Telecom

I think the issue here is that it may not be a problem at all. It's something we can only speculate on and it's hard to know from this thread whether there is a problem, or the phone simply doesn't meet the expectations of the end user.

Battery usage on modern phones varies considerably depending on what apps you run. I can easily drain my SGS III in ~6 hours if I run certain apps. Likelywise if I disable things I can get two days from the phones. It doesn't mean there is a fault because the battery doesn't last a day.

mattwnz

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#720747 21-Nov-2012 13:37

sbiddle:
AndrewMac: It may be a manufacturing problem but it was purchased from Telecom

I think the issue here is that it may not be a problem at all. It's something we can only speculate on and it's hard to know from this thread whether there is a problem, or the phone simply doesn't meet the expectations of the end user.

Battery usage on modern phones varies considerably depending on what apps you run. I can easily drain my SGS III in ~6 hours if I run certain apps. Likelywise if I disable things I can get two days from the phones. It doesn't mean there is a fault because the battery doesn't last a day.

The difference with an s3 though, is you can easily swap the battery for a new one, so battery life isn't so much of a concern. With the iphone, it doesn't really have a consumable battery, it is an internal power source, due to it being non user replaceable. The s3 has a consumable battery, due to it being user replaceable. So if the iphone it doesn't work well from day one, then that is a concern. They did say the have compared it to the older iphone, and that had better life. I know someone who purchased an iphone 4s overseas, and it had terrible battery life, they took it into an apple store, and they swapped it straight away, and the replacement didn't have this problem. So there is a possibility that it does have a bad battery. Must be really frustrating buying them in NZ without that apple store support, and you have to rely on the retailer to send it off to be assessed etc.

AndrewMac

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#720765 21-Nov-2012 14:15

Yeah, battery life is one of the harder falls to diagnose because it could be any number of other factors or settings influencing it rather than an actual fault

zkarj

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#721778 23-Nov-2012 11:11

Have you done a battery conditioning? I have friends who swear by this, especially with new devices, but also once a month.

1. Charge the battery fully.
2. Drain the battery completely - to the point where the device turns itself off.
3. Charge the battery fully again.

Sounds like you won't have much of a problem with step 2.

It is intrinsically hard to determine what is 'good' battery life for a given device because usage due to fingers on screen AND background processes (including radios) varies dramatically in a smartphone.

The only true test is two factory restored phones (or otherwise identical, but that's hard) placed within very close proximity to one another for the entire period it takes the battery to drain.

I'm not a heavy user, but I do frequently pick up my iPhone 5 to check Twitter or email or something and I have push notifications on for numerous apps and location on for some and I can generally pull my phone off the charger at home around 7:15am and still have around 20% left by the time I get home at 6:30pm. That usually includes listening to podcasts for about 80 minutes while I'm commuting. I do have spotty wifi at work, so that does help a little.

richms

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#722052 23-Nov-2012 21:46

Since my S2 is coming up a year old and has terrible battery life, I put it on my hobby charger to do a discharge test, and it scored a whopping 800ish mAh, which is about the same as the dirt cheap ebay one does. And well down on the new capacity. That was done at 300mA discharge rate, it might have been slightly better at a lower rate.

The problem I am having is that the phone would show 20% or so and then as soon as I lit the flash up with either a photo or a flashlight app it would just turn off.

I suppose you could pull the battery out of an iPhone and test the capacity, but I would expect that it would be fine from new and a software issue. I can see no reason why a phone repairer cannot test the cell's capacity and give you the results.

Richard rich.ms

michaelmurfy

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#722583 25-Nov-2012 16:21

I somehow don't think this guy is coming back >.>

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lucky015

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#722600 25-Nov-2012 17:05

In my book if you buy an iPhone you lose the right to complain about battery issues.

I see each day at work everyone with an iPhone walks in straight away plugs in their phone to the computers to charge it, Those with other phones don't seem to have this same requirement, Occasionally you see someone poking around looking for a cable to charge their S3 or other android device with but that's nothing compared to the panic from an iPhone user who forgot their cable.

richms

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#722604 25-Nov-2012 17:07

lucky015: but that's nothing compared to the panic from an iPhone user who forgot their cable.

Particularly now that their prior stock of cables has been rendered useless and there isnt yet a supply of reliable compatible cables to re-populate workplaces and homes and cars with

Richard rich.ms

zkarj

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#722622 25-Nov-2012 17:40

lucky015: In my book if you buy an iPhone you lose the right to complain about battery issues.

Yeah, I know I can't stop using mine, so I tend to use up the battery a lot faster. Maybe I should get a droid so it just stays in my pocket longer.

Seriously, though, I get irked at my team leader's ability to walk out of the office in the evening with >70% remaining on her iPhone 4 when I struggled to hold mine over 40%. It REALLY is how you use it. I don't think iPhones are any worse than many other phones out there.

lucky015

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#722624 25-Nov-2012 17:44

zkarj:
lucky015: In my book if you buy an iPhone you lose the right to complain about battery issues.

Yeah, I know I can't stop using mine, so I tend to use up the battery a lot faster. Maybe I should get a droid so it just stays in my pocket longer.

Seriously, though, I get irked at my team leader's ability to walk out of the office in the evening with >70% remaining on her iPhone 4 when I struggled to hold mine over 40%. It REALLY is how you use it. I don't think iPhones are any worse than many other phones out there.

lol, I tease my Team Leader about her phone going flat while mine is still at almost full charge, We both have S3's but she does use hers considerably more.

apekgoh

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#731708 13-Dec-2012 00:51

my regional colleagues who came here has an Samsung Notes 2 with a whopping 3100mAH battery (or maybe just 3000mAH can't remember), and a HUGE screen, and he told me it could last him 2 full 8 hours per day without a charge.

well he is a heavy user, facebook video, vchat, whatsapp, receiving international call, etc!! i am impressed with bigger phones with better battery management software.

navinbhat

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#763952 17-Feb-2013 23:24

Right; after 3 months of perseverance from my side and and lot of effort, my issue has finally been resolved. I finally got a full refund on my iPhone 5 from Telecom. But it wasn't easy and took a hell of a lot of determination from my side :

- After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing (including misplacing the test data I had given them !! Oops ?), in early December TNZ agreed to provide me with a refurbished iPhone 5. I refused on the grounds that it was of a lesser value than a new unit and there was no compensation on offer. Consumer NZ supported this stance too.

- Late December, TNZ then agreed to provide me with partial refund on my phone. Reason ? Because three months had passed since the start of my issue and the value of my new phone had dropped. It was my fault. Go figure. I was obviously not happy about this and asked them to reconsider given that I also had my other services with them. Without warning, the offer was taken off the table and I basically told to dispute this if I wished to.

- Two days later, on 22nd December, I filed a case at the disputes tribunal. The hearing was set for next week.

- TNZ called me couple of weeks ago and settled.

I obviously cannot present the whole case here but if anyone is interested and perhaps in the same boat as me, I am more than happy to assist you and share my notes.

The overall experience has left a very sour taste in my mouth w.r.t. Telecom. Personally I'd never consider purchasing an Apple product in the future from any retailer other than Apple directly. They seem to protect their brand experience better than any other authorised retailers.

Consumer NZ were a great sounding board for me through this issue. I'd definitely recommend engaging them in such cases.

michaelmurfy

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#763953 17-Feb-2013 23:37

navinbhat:
The overall experience has left a very sour taste in my mouth w.r.t. Telecom. Personally I'd never consider purchasing an Apple product in the future from any retailer other than Apple directly. They seem to protect their brand experience better than any other authorised retailers.

*Facepalm* Telecom offered to replace the phone with a refurbished unit, which is the same as a new unit with the exception it's been 100% checked over by some guy overseas and repaired to be just like a new unit.

If you said to Apple "Oh, I am having difficulty with my phone" they would too replace it with a refurb, the rules don't change, it's what Apple do.

It's not Telecom's fault at all, it's what they're told to do by Apple - Telecom offered to resolve the issue with a more than adequate solution but you declined, they did their part of the CGA and the Apple warranty but you took things further, to be honest getting a refurb iPhone is not as bad as people make out, the ones out of the box haven't been through the same quality checks as the refurb ones since the refurb ones have had an actual human to look over it's refurb process + make sure it's quality assured.

Morel of the story, if you send your iPhone to Apple or a service agent to fix, you get a refurb, the reason is they don't want the "new" phone to fault like the old one so this way they're 99% assured the phone won't fault meaning happy end customer. If Telecom didn't say that it was a refurb and "replaced" it for you then you'll honestly never know, nor would your cat, or anyone else, it has not lowered the value but increased it since you can now call it new.

</rant>

mattwnz

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#763954 17-Feb-2013 23:48

michaelmurfy:

Morel of the story, if you send your iPhone to Apple or a service agent to fix, you get a refurb, the reason is they don't want the "new" phone to fault like the old one so this way they're 99% assured the phone won't fault meaning happy end customer.

I don't believe that is the reason at all, as the odds of getting new phone without any problems is very low. Intead I believe the reason they give out refurbs, is because they have a lot of refurb stock which have been repaired, which they can't sell as new. If you have a 6 month old phone, you wouldn't expect to get it replaced with a brand new one, but for it to be repaired, and a refurb is the equivalent of a repaired phone.

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