Dear Apple:

I am writing to express my disappointment in the Apple 3G White 16GB iPhone. I have found areas of the iPhone to be inferior to my previous smart phone, the Treo 650p. As most would agree, Apple is a visionary organization known for pushing the limits of user experience and customer satisfaction. Therefore, I did not expect that things like battery life and phone reliability would give me fits when I made my “investment” in your technology.

iPhone 3G Battery Life Sucks

So let me just come right out and say, without mincing words, that the battery life of my iPhone 3G is horrible. I get all of these great phone features like: email, youtube, applications and web surfing and Apple’s marketing encourages me (in every marketing campaign) to use them, and then find that my battery needs a boost around 2PM every day.

I even believed some of the Apple zealot propoganda out there. See the third comment on that thread. It basically “reminds us” that lithium batteries need to drain totally, then have several 12 hour charging cycles before we judge them. I did this. I made sure that my battery was totally drained, not just mostly dead.

I have 2 problems.

• Apple obviously knew that the battery life was going to be a problem or they would not have put out this comprehensive guide to becoming an iPhone battery ninja. It’s practically a course syllabus.
• The phone is sealed so that I cannot swap the battery for a replacement mid-day even if I want to

Let’s take an in depth look at the suggestions for improving battery life.

• Minimize use of location services: OK done!
• Fetch New Data Less Frequently: Oh, ok. I guess I can get my mail less frequently.
• Turn off push mail: How infrequent are we talking now? Every hour is a long time to wait
• Auto-check fewer email accounts. Is 3 too many? Gmail, Yahoo and Corporate email are all pretty important. I guess I could scale back.
• Minimize use of 3rd party applications. But, I thought you wanted me to get cool stuff that differentiates my phone from every other phone. So I can have it, but I just shouldn’t use it that often? What if I meet a Sith Lord and need to battle with my Phone Saber? What if I don’t recognize a whole block of songs and need a whole lotta Shazam? Seems unfair that I should be encourages with 16GB of space and not be able to use the apps when I want to.
• Turn off Wi-Fi. I thought that WiFi was supposed to help battery life. Oh, I see it does! “If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.” Man, that sure is confusing. I hope there is a one-click method for picking which configuration I am using. I move around a lot during the day.
• Turn off Bluetooth: I don’t use it. It’s off.
• Use Airplane mode in low coverage areas. AT&T has low coverage areas? GASP! It’s the “largest wireless operator in the country”.
• Adjust Brightness. All the time?
• Turn off EQ. Reduction in sound quality! AWESOME
• Turn off 3G. Great idea. Turtle phone.

Would it have been that hard to expose the battery and let us buy another battery/charger so that we could run all day?

Sincerely,

the Michael Schneider

Readers: what thoughts would you add?

re: @chrisbrogan’s tweet:
chrisbrogan Is Twitter an intern-level responsibility for a business? http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe . Look@comments

Like anything with Twitter, the more transparent you are, the better. It depends on the social media related goals of the company. I see pros and cons to this dip-your-toe-in-before-jumping-in strategy.

If the intern is twizzlin’ to get a sense for web related buzz, to make announcements about upcoming objects-of-interest, or take feedback with an “I’ll check and get back to you” sort of flare versus being expected to be the online voice of the organization, then I think it is excellent. The intern could be twitter triage! It would be difficult to expect an intern to be able to represent the company. That’s a lot of pressure for someone who may not know the company very well.  That said, if Claris Networks has not made a “we’re on twitter” announcement to their customers, they might find that they have a limited, manageable following/stream at first that they can use as a microcosm for what they actually want.

Businesses should expect that they are going to achieve limited benefits vs. putting an executive or even a full-time community manager online. And I’m sure they do. Businesspeople are smart. They understand the value of their resources and tend to (at least it is their best intention to) allocate their sparse resources carefully. We don’t all have AT ATs, Tie Fighters, Battle Cruisers and Death Stars at our disposal!

Looking hypothetically, I can picture the decision makers of Claris Networks in a room talking about social media and its impact.  I can picture both evangelism and nay-saying. I could picture them coming to the conclusion that they should be doing something and that either they will use an intern to get learnings about the benefits or  use them until they can hire a community manager (anyone checked their site for this exciting potential career opportunity?)

If you look at Claris Networks’ twitter stream, it is pretty sparse on the “social” and heavier on the announcements. This article will certainly help them shape their strategy and perhaps help them engage in a more warm and transparent way. I’m a new follower and I’m excited to see how their twitter and social media presence evolves. 加油 Go Claris Networks! 加油 Good to see an increasing number of people like Brooks Brown out there who get it!

I figure that Google must be close to having some technology that can actually distinguish the voices in a film or video from the music track. I would guess they can use their text-to-speech capabilities to listen to video content and save either the entire contents or a set of keywords as determined by a secret-sauce-like formula.

I know that Google understands the importance of video, after all they bought youtube. They also have at least one text-to-speech experiment in Goog-411 (that we know of) and they have the resources of Emperor Palpatine. If Amazon can scan the lion’s share of their books, couldn’t Google “watch” and digitally imprint all of youtube’s videos? They have the processing power.

The trick is the isolation of the vocal tracks. Most would argue that this is impossible because when you combine all the tracks like in a .wav file, the track information is left behind, but there are people who claim that they can get (most of) the music track to go away.; If anyone can do it Google can, right? And if they can do that, they can implement speech recognition technology and output the results to good ol’ XML.
What do you think? Could they be close? Are they working on it?