Apple has acknowledged the issue reported earlier of terrible battery life on the iPhone 4S 

The Apple message boards are filling up as customers complain over and over again about the miserable battery performance of the newest iPhone 4S smart phone. Call center wait times exceed 30 minutes, and Apple Express Lane “we’ll call you on your schedule” appointments are not to be had.

Countless users have already returned their 4S handsets for refunds. Even more are flocking to the Genius bars and Apple stores demanding replacement phones only to find that the problem persists with the replacement devices.

The general consensus of speculation is that Apple is working feverishly to identify a software bug that is causing the battery drain and that a patch to iOS 5 will be coming soon.  My personal experience calling tech support was that I was put through a barrage of questions regarding how I have my phone configured and when I notice the most battery drain. The representative, clearly reading from a script, was taking my information down in an effort to find commonalities across the complaints, I assume, in order to try to narrow down the issue.

Many customers are already drawing parallels between this post-launch faux pas to “Antenna Gate” which followed the release of the iPhone 4 wherein certain hand positions on the handset caused signal to drop or vanish completely.  Apple responded to this design blunder by offering free cases to anyone who purchased an iPhone 4.

With any luck at all, Apple will be able to correct this issue with a coding fix and will not have to recall handsets for battery or board replacements (gulp)!

I have heard the numbers…

• 4 million sold in the first weekend.
• Lines around the block at the Apple Store
• 1-2 week web delivery times due to high demand and record sales

Well 4 days in to my iPhone 4S experience, my handset is on its way back to Apple.

Why?

1. Start out with atrocious battery life.  Unplugging with a full charge at 9:00 am left me at 25% battery by 3:00 pm and that is with very little use. Many say the battery drain is because of location-based services like the location-aware reminders and “find my iPhone” even turning all of the iCloud-based services leaves the batter performance miserable. My old iPhone 4 ran laps around this device for battery longevity.
2. Siri is down more than it is up.  Trying to make use of the new, clever personal assistant Siri is an exercise in frustration too. Most times i tried to make practical use of it in the real world (middle of the business day while driving) I am greeted with “I”m sorry, I cannot connect to the network right now” or “Something’s gone wrong, can you say that again?”
3. Call failures galore. AT&T clearly got hammered on this roll out because activation times on their network were north of 3 hours and call failures, even through my micro cell, were abundant.

In short, pass on this one. Coming from an Apple fan… Wait for the iPhone 5 hopefully next year.

Well if this week taught us anything, it is that the architecture the RIM used to deliver mail to 40 million handsets is fundamentally flawed.

Routing all of your corporate email through a third party introduces another point of failure and leaves you at the mercy of RIM’s network.

This outage of more than 3 days represents their second such in as many years.

We’ve been touting the benefits of Windows Mobile, Android, and iOS for years.

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