Apple posted details of its iPad battery replacement service earlier this week. Mind you,the iPad isn’t even expected to hit the stores until April 3rd. Perhaps Apple has learned something from the battery life backlash that continues to plague its iconic iPhone.

“The iPad’s typical use scenario is sans power cord, whereas the power cord travels with the laptop,” says Aaron Vronko, CEO of Raid Repair, which services broken iPods and iPhones and replaces worn-out batteries. “It’s the biggest device to be used off the power cord most of the time. That makes the battery a huge factor in the success of this device and how it’s received by its audience.”

Apple’s iPad $99 battery replacement service is a bit of a misnomer; Apple will replace the entire iPad, not the battery.

Already, the iPad battery has come under fire. The iPad’s 10-inch LCD display requires a battery that’s more than five times the capacity and size of the iPhone 3GS battery. The screen alone consumes roughly 2 watts per hour, Vronko says, and will drain the large battery in 12 hours by itself.

Apple, which claims the iPad has a 10-hour battery life, doesn’t want the iPad to face the kind of vitriolic complaints regarding battery life that the iPhone has endured since its debut.

Bad News: Your iPhone Battery Is Dying

Every time you go through a charge cycle on your iPhone, you’ll permanently lose anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute of battery capacity. Typically, you’ll get 250 to 500 charge cycles before a lithium ion battery has outlived its usefulness, Vronko says.

(A charge cycle covers the entire capacity of the battery. For instance, if you drained a third of the battery and recharged it, and then used two-thirds of the battery the next day and recharged it, this would still be considered a single charge cycle.)

Using your iPhone in extreme temperatures—below 40 degrees Fahrenheit or above 95 degrees—will degrade the battery capacity faster, he says. Also, you shouldn’t regularly run your iPhone battery completely down before recharging it. Doing these things will shave maybe a minute and half off the total battery capacity per charge cycle, Vronko says.

However, it’s a good practice to run the battery dead before fully recharging it once a month to keep the chip on the battery and the chip on the device that measure the current flowing back and forth in sync . This is one of Vronko’s six tips for cleaning and caring for your iPhone.

There are ways to improve battery life of a single charge cycle. Here are three tips for getting more juice:

1. Disable power-hungry features such as Wi-Fi, Notifications and Location Services.

2. Buy a battery pack, especially if you plan on taking your iPhone to places that don’t have a ready power outlet like, say, a golf course. (Check out my review of iPhone app Golfshot GPS.)

3. Get it tested by an Apple Genius, because anecdotal evidence suggests there are a lot of iPhone 3GS lemons with poorly performing batteries on the market.

Time to Replace Your Battery?

Eventually, though, you’ll need to replace your iPhone battery.

Vronko says the battery-replacement demand curve starts with a 10-month-old iPhone. “That’s when we get the first run of customers,” he says. These customers are often heavy iPhone users who may have lost up to 30 percent of the original battery life—and 70 percent of the remaining battery is not good enough for them.

Next, Vronko sees a pick-up in demand for battery replacement with 12-to-15-month-old iPhones. The peak age for battery replacements is 18 months.

Rapid Repair charges $20 for just the iPhone battery, although you’ll have to be brave enough to put in the new battery yourself. Or it’ll cost $50 for the battery and Rapid Repair to do it.

For do-it-yourself folks, swapping in a new battery on an iPhone 3G or 3GS isn’t terribly difficult. The units have tiny screws for removing the outer shell, and the battery has a pluggable module. This wasn’t the case with the original iPhone, which had a battery that was soldered to the unit.

Vronko hasn’t seen the iPad yet, although he figures battery replacement won’t be easy given the iPad’s unibody design. Another sign is the fact that Apple itself plans to replace whole iPads rather than batteries.

“My guess is that the iPad is going to be more difficult for end users to open up the case without damaging it, in order to replace the battery,” Vronko says.

Tom Kaneshige is a senior writer for CIO.com in Silicon Valley. Send him an email at tkaneshige@cio.com. Or follow him on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

The original article can be found here.

Aaron Vronko

With all the hype over Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s iPad announcement now behind us, Apple-eyes have now turned their attention to what might be on the docket for the anticipated release of iPhone 4G. We’ve torn down and rebuilt thousands of iPhones over the last few years and talked with scores of customers about how they’re using it and what’s important—and not important—to them. Based on Apple’s past patterns of gadget refreshes plus the design and hardware unveiled in the iPad, here are our predictions for what we can expect from the iPhone 4G, which is likely to drop sometime early this summer.

Redesigned aluminum unibody styling

Starting with its iPods, Apple has settled into a fairly predictable pattern of releasing a physical redesign one year and hardware performance upgrade the next. The venerable iPhone 3G embodied the total design overhaul (while keeping hardware performance nearly unchanged.)  A year later, the 3Gs came as an identical twin, but with a surge in performance due to a faster CPU, graphics processor and upgrades to even the minor chips. Since third-party iPhone apps and users are just starting to really take advantage of the new power from the 3Gs, it’s unlikely Apple is ready splinter it’s market again by upgrading performance in the 4th generation iPhone (aka iPhone 4G.)   The 4G’s new cutting edge energy sipping chips will instead be used to make a slimmer and sleeker exterior design of the Mac unibody styling, similar to the iPad with a single piece of aluminum casing with single glass front panel.

Chip change

Apple will likely integrate its new A4 chip into the iPhone 4G, albeit a clocked-down version to meet performance demands without unnecessarily sapping battery power. The 1Ghz A4 for iPad will likely be underclocked to around 600Mhz—ample horsepower for a device that doesn’t support multitasking. Besides, from a marketing perspective, Apple must leave a market segment for the iPad to have a unique purpose. To launch an iPhone with nearly identical hardware capabilities would undermine the company’s own market leadership and complicate the app store with three tiers of iPhone/iTouch app performance.

OLED screen

As much as they might have liked to put an OLED on board the iPad, the technology and manufacturing was at least six months away in displays of 7 inches or more. For the iPhone 4G, however, an OLED screen makes perfect sense. OLED screens up to 5” have been popping up in most of the latest class of new gadgets since late 2009.  While the current class of OLEDs can be hard to view in direct sunlight, Samsung has announced the first production runs of its new Super AM-OLED screens that are 25% brighter and may finally be a solid option for daylight use. Samsung has been a major supplier for Apple’s mobile devices in recent years and may be keen to preserve that revenue stream and showcase their lead in OLED screen tech with Apple as the first OEM customer with its new screen.

Improved secondary/tertiary app performance

The iPhone’s 4 or 5 headline functions (docked apps) likely won’t change much on a 4G version, but we are likely to see some changes to the secondary apps (the ones that come with every phone, but aren’t docked.)

A revamped developer’s kit

Apple’s been wise about cultivating the app industry it’s created, so last year Apple was careful not to alienate older iPhone users when they unveiled apps with superior performance on a 3Gs.  This cautious step forward left many developers content to code for the lowest common denominator (iPhone 2G) for an easier. The iPhone 4G launch will likely bring with it a focus on tweaking the developer’s kit and store so that app developers are empowered and encouraged to leverage the 3Gs and 4G capabilities for more powerful, engaging, and useful apps.    This year Apple will be keen to retain its leadership position by putting the focus on apps that require a 3Gs or better for full function.

Not going to happen

No discussion of predicted iPhone 4G features would be complete without the one it likely will not have: a front-facing web cam. Yep, you read that right: despite lots of rumors that video chat is coming, it just doesn’t seem plausible—yet. The fact is that North American networks simply are nowhere near capable of handling the demand. AT&T (NYSE: T) already takes considerable heat for its lack of capacity to handle iPhone traffic. When it debuts, video chat will be a headline feature for the iPhone, but Apple won’t do that if, “it just works… sometimes.”

There is, however, much greater demand and capacity for video chat in the European and Asian markets to the extent that phones without it may be seen as old tech. This begs the question: could an international version of the iPhone be on the horizon?

Editor’s note: We’ll know more about the iPhone 4G – or whatever Apple decides to call their next-generation iPhone – in the coming months. Stay tuned!

About the Author

Aaron Vronko is the founder and service manager at Rapid Repair, the most well-known and reputable national online repair service for digital electronics, including the iPhone, iPod and more. The company dissects more than 500 devices every week at its repair shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For more information, visit www.rapidrepair.com.

The original article can be found here.