No 3G on the iPhone, but why? A Battery Life Analysis

In Most of the initial reviews of Apple's iPhone
shared one complaint in common: AT&T's EDGE network was slow, and it's the fastest cellular network the iPhone supported.In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs explained Apple's rationale for not including 3G support in the initial iPhone:

"When we looked at 3G, the chipsets are not quite mature, in the sense that they're not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I'm sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision."

The primary benefit of 3G support is obvious: faster data rates. Using dslreports.com's mobile speed test, we were able to pull an average of 100kbps off of AT&T's EDGE network as compared to 1Mbps on its 3G UMTS/WCDMA network............
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Final Words

Without a doubt, current 3G implementations do require more space and consume more power than simply outfitting a phone with support for EDGE. Using the Samsung Blackjack as an example, turning on 3G reduces battery life by around 25% under web/email use. The biggest impact of all is, surprisingly enough, talk time; with 3G enabled, the Blackjack's talk time is cut in half, with absolutely no benefit realized from the higher bandwidth standard.

At the same time, Apple's choice to include 802.11b/g support in the iPhone makes a lot of sense. Battery life actually increases with Wi-Fi over EDGE whenever the data connection is being used, not to mention that performance goes up tremendously as well.

Apple had to make a number of tradeoffs with the iPhone, and without a doubt its power hungry screen was not worth sacrificing, even for better network performance. The iPhone's biggest selling point is its UI, and Apple seems to have made the right tradeoff by embracing Wi-Fi for the first generation - as frustrating as it may be for users.

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