Self imposed living with the iPhone 3G

I drove back to my London place on Thursday evening leaving my main handset — the +44 7769 658 104 number — sat somewhere, slowly draining its battery.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought I had it with me. I discovered it was missing on Friday morning.

And I’ve — perhaps rather obviously — not been returning calls from it. SpinVox is proving rather useful though. If you phone the number, it’ll ring (I think, if it’s still got battery) and then it’ll go to SpinVox and I will get your message in email format pretty soon after.

What an arse!

The one phone I did have with me was my new iPhone 3G. I charged it up on Friday morning and deployed it as my live handset that morning. I used the handset’s Exchange support to immediately over-the-air sync it with my calendar, contacts and whatnot. That function is brilliant. Just brilliant.

I then began my day. Fridays are busy. Filled with meetings. (Incidentally, if you’d like to meet so I can do a profile about you, mail me and let’s set a time.) I was using my Google Maps like no tomorrow and the email. During my meeting with Ilja Laurs, CEO of GetJar, I noticed an issue. I’d used half the battery. I was taking regular notes as Ilja spoke across the hour and I could more or less see the battery indicator reducing.

Piece of rubbish!

I got through Ilja’s interview then by the time I met Shaun Barriball, MD of MobileIQ, I was on some paltry 30% level of battery power.

As I walked to another meeting, I started to formally worry about the lack of battery power.

I took a 10 minute phone call, strolling through St James’ Park and, at the end of this, found that nearly all of my green ‘juice’ had gone.

Piece of shit!

There was no way the handset was going to survive until well into the evening.

I managed to charge it up when I got back, temporarily, to the office. That helped. But I have now spent Friday and the whole weekend with the iPhone 3G as my primary handset. And it’s OK.

OK.

They’ve done a Nokia.

They’ve shipped it out, not quite ready. The applications are crashing. The push pull bollocks that Mr Jobs was so proud of, during his presentation, doesn’t work. It’s not been activated. GOODNESS knows what that will do to the sodding battery power.

I really can’t stand using a device when you can SEE the battery power leeching from it. Just take a photo and then upload it with ShoZu and woosh, that’s got to be 1-2% of the power gone. You can see it going. For someone used to the power of an N95 or E90, this is worrying. I’ve spent the weekend hoping no one phones me because, er, that’ll use up battery power that I need to just keep the device operational across the day.

And I’m not carrying some sodding power charger for it. What’s the point of that?

Rubbish.

I’m content with the device. I’m making pained faces at o2’s network which… well, it’s either the iPhone screwing up or it’s the o2 network. Or both. Actually, forget that, it’ll be the iPhone arsing up.

I actually walked all the way down Piccadilly like a total PLUM trying to get the maps to work. Restarted the device eventually. That worked. After I’d found the street.

Get it working Mr Jobs.