You know how it is when you get new glasses. Before you go to see the ophthalmologist, you think you can see just fine. Your vision has deteriorated so slowly that you’ve adapted to it. When you pop on the new specs and walk out the door, it’s a shock. The world is so much crisper and more detailed than you remembered it.
It’s like that with cell phone batteries. They slowly lose capacity, and you adjust. It’s only when they get bad enough that you can’t live with it anymore, and you spring for a new one, that you realize how weak they were. During last weekend’s Brooks Jensen workshop I noticed that my Droid X could barely go 10 hours. When I was supposed to be paying attention to Brooks, I used my iPad (saving what remained of my battery charge on the Droid X) to order a new battery from Amazon. It came Wednesday, I charged it overnight, and I’m amazed: the phone can go two days if I don’t use it much.
I’ve only had the phone about nine months. This is too soon for the battery to die. I’m not sure what to blame. Maybe the battery was defective. Maybe there’s something wrong with one of my chargers. We’ll see how long this one lasts.
It got me thinking about what things would’ve been like with an iPhone. Removing all the content (possibly optional for some people, but I don’t like the idea of all of my e-mail, contacts, and calendar information in the hands of some faceless Apple employee). A trip to the UPS store to mail it back. A few days without a cell phone. Restoring all the content. Not the worst thing that could happen, but a minor hassle just the same.
If it had happened nine months into my iPhone ownership, there’s no question that I would just grit my teeth and send it back for new battery. But what if it had been two years? I’d probably just order a new phone. Do you suppose Apple is counting on that?
Leave a Reply