Dingle Speaks

I visited a customer yesterday, among the many items they deal in they’ve started moving into iPhone covers.

During the meeting I was eyeing up some neat covers that clip into matching desk stands which you can flip from horizontal to vertical.

We eventually talked about iPhones and I mentioned that I liked some of their stuff. “AH!” he said, “let me get you something” and off he went.

He came back with something and picked up my phone, discarded the old cover, fitted a new one and handed it back.

Now, this is the cover I used to have, nice and tasteful matt black:

And this is what I now have:

Fortunately I managed to retrieve my old cover on the way out….

I updated my iPhone to 4.3.1 recently and got major battery issues, I went from normal usage (over a day) to needing to recharge about 3 times a day, even when mostly on standby.

Upgrading to 4.3.2 didn’t help

Two nights ago I went to bed at midnight with my phone at 60% then woke up at 6am with a dead phone, I recharged to 15% before leaving for the office, then found my phone was dead again on arriving at the office 45 mins later..

Not sure what the problem was but my iPhone was constantly hot because of the rate the battery wad being eaten up. Similar problems have been noted on the net but nobody seemed to have a solution (switching off ping didn’t help). My bet is on one of the 3rd party apps I have installed, it seems hard to believe that it could be a standard Apple app, you’ve got to believe they test updates on all their own stuff before releasing!

So I switched off everything (location services, push alerts, notification services, external mail etc etc), reset the iPhone and so far my battery is back to normal, I’m down 20% in 15 hours (compared to 15% in 1 hour yesterday).

Now I’m slowly reintroducing services 1 by 1 to see which is the culprit, external mail had no effect, about to reintroduce push email, will update later!

Edit: Ok, switching notifications back on had no impact on battery usage.
I then tried switching back to push for my work email account, with the phone on standby the battery dropped 10% in just 35 minutes.
I switched off push and the battery only lost 2% in 90 minutes.

So, it’s looking like an issue with pushed email. For reference i’m using mobileiron to access my work email, possibly an incompatibility issue with the latest updates.

Last time I went to H’s hometown I left my iPhone charger at her sisters
place. While waiting for it to get sent back I bought a cheap (20rmb i think) compact copy at Cybermart which I never got round to using because I found my old iPod touch adapter when I got home.

Anyhooo I was packing for a korea trip last night and was packing light (one night trip) so thought I’d give the compact charger a try.

I figured i’d better test it first so I plugged the charger lead into the iPhone and the other end into the charger, then plugged it into the wall. There was an immediate loud POP and a small fizzing cloud of black smoke came from the charger.

I was convinced I’d fried my iPhone but it’s still working fine, thank FSM! I was lucky though, that’s the last time I connect my iPhone before plugging the charger into the wall and the very last time I plug it into an unofficial accessory!

I’m sure confucious has some kind of proverb about this kind of thing but this really isn’t that kind blog, CARRY ON!

Pics below: