And I thought the problem was with my iPhone!

For the last few weeks, I was a little upset with my iPhone. The battery would die really fast, sometimes by early afternoon even though I charged it fully every morning. This would necessitate another round of charging in the evening to prevent the phone from going off.

I thought the battery had run out of life and I would need to change the battery. Heaven knows, its difficult (impossible?) to change your iPhone battery in India. Nevertheless, the choice was to get another iPhone, an expensive proposition. Haplessly, I went through the motions. Called the iStore. No luck. They did not change iPhone batteries. Try the Airtel office, they said. They are the ones providing the service and they should be able to do it for you.

I called the Airtel office. They asked me if I had bought it from them. No, I said. I got it from the US. Oops, they said. Then we may not be able to do it for you. You will have to walk into our office for us to be able to tell you.

I then called the local Apple reseller. They said they didn't do it either but they gave me the number of someone who did. I called this 'someone'. Turned out to be a lady. She asked me to send her the model number. She would order the battery and let me know. I would have to leave the phone with her for a few days (I managed to bring this down to a night) and she would do it. Cost: Rs. 2,500.

No bad, I thought. Go ahead and do it, I told her and sent her the model number.

While I was waiting for the battery to arrive, in a totally unrelated story, I changed the SIM card on my iPhone from Idea to Airtel. I was getting fed up with the lack of coverage of Idea and decided it was high time I switched to a better network.

For the next few days, I noticed the battery life on my iPhone was much longer. I did not have to charge for a long, long time!

I realized that since the Idea network coverage was so bad, every now and then the network would be lost and my poor iPhone would drain battery while trying to search for the network. With the much better Airtel network, this problem ceased to exist.

And I thought the problem was with my iPhone!

Comments

Ankur said…
Oh.. i never realized it could be because of this reason also.. i am also using Idea connection in Delhi on my windows mobile and facing exactly the same problem. I think its time for me too to shift to a better network.
Yikes!! I have a Tata indicom CDMA mobile and that's gets switched off every often... for the same bad network/ coverage reason... so I switched to Airtel network (which is best service provider in the areas I move around) long back!!!