iPhone News Updated

iPhone battery drain–’Setting Time Zone’ may be culprit

Having initially pointed out customer complaints about subpar battery life in the iPhone 4S, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper has followed up with a report about a possible culprit and a possible temporary fix.

The Guardian said yesterday that some 4S users who had griped on Apple’s support Web site about the power drain were being contacted by the company and sent diagnostic files that could be sent back to Apple for analysis. Numerous users have been saying their phones are lasting just a few hours, even with minimal use, the Guardian said.

Now the paper reports that a location-based feature in the phone that detects when you’ve physically moved to a different time zone and then resets the phone’s clock accordingly may be the problem.

Apparently, the “Setting Time Zone” feature is polling cell phone towers constantly to determine the phone’s location rather than doing so only on occasion. The phone’s location-tracking setup triangulates information on the power of cell tower signals in order to situate the device.

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Apple’s Siri Speaks Also on iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G

The end of Siri’s exclusivity on the iPhone 4S may be near. No, I’m not talking about Siri running on the purported Apple television set, but Siri on jailbroken iPhone 4 and — possibly — 3GS handsets.

Ireland-based hacker Steve Troughton-Smith and his San Francisco-based comrade Grant Paul (no relation to the author) over the weekend claimed they got Apple’s voice-enabled digital assistant functioning properly on an iPhone 4 and a fourth generation iPod Touch.

The pair solved the problem using Troughton-Smith’s code for the Siri port developed earlier this month, as well as software authentication tokens from a jailbroken iPhone 4S. Screenshots of the hack were posted to Twitter as well as two YouTube videos demonstrating the Siri port, one of which was given exclusively to 9-to5 Mac.

“I’ve tested pretty much every type of interaction you can make with [Siri on the iPhone 4],” Troughton-Smith told PCWorld in an interview via instant messenger. “It works just as well as the iPhone 4S, and I’ve seen it work even faster than it at times.” The only feature that doesn’t work, according to Troughton-Smith, is the iPhone 4S’s so-called “raise to speak” feature that allows you to activate Siri’s voice-command interface by raising the phone to your ear. The problem with raise to speak on Siri, Troughton-Smith says, is that it requires the new gyroscope in the 4S; it’s not clear whether this could be solved. Google offers a similar raise to speak feature in its search application for iOS devices, including the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

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