No Blackberry 3G battery tests got you down? Read 'em and weep, babe:

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/battery_life_is.html

Seems RIM can't get the thing to work. The biggest problem? Battery life!

How the haters hate!

JoeL

Not having read all the comments... (This may have been asked.)

Seems absurd to limit battery testing to 10 hrs max. I can't imagine....

Forbes' 500: The 82 people worth more than $1B (in alphabetical order)

Wow! What a cover!

The problem with this is that even RIM estimates its battery life at just 4.3 hours for their EV-DO model:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/device-detail.jsp?navId=H0,C221,P883#tab_tab_specifications

. . . the 8330. And Mobile Tech's review put "real" battery life at less than that:
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/phones/BlackBerry-Curve-8330.htm

Add to that, the fact that you can't surf and talk at the same time on an EV-DO phone and the even shorter battery life if you use its multimedia features (see review), if they had included it, it would have fallen far down in the pack. Other reviewers rate the batter life as longer, but if you read them closely they're talking about "talk time," not talk and surf and email and mulitmedia. This is where the iPhone really pulls away.

The Blackberrys have their place and for the right consumer it's a fine platform, but they are a generation behind in technology and, apparently, battery life.

JoeL

A Dutch start up , called 3GJUICE produces the the strongest iPhone 3G battery extender avalaible, 1770 mAh. The owner, Henk van Ess, is a well known internet guru in The Netherlands. He became so angry with the battery life of his iPhone last Friday, that he shopped around in Linkedin to find a manufacturer who could produce the strongest possible battery in the smallest possible case (6 cm). The former record of 1200 mAh was from a RichardSolo, the 3G JUICE has 50% more power and gives the iPhone 1770 mAh. Apple has already certified it, because the 30 pin connector is from the certified vendor Apple uses.

It has a cap so it can slide into your pocket. With 3 or 4 3G JUICE's you can talk for 24 hrs (better get a life if you want to do that). Gizmodo in The Netherlands thinks that Dutch dude will be a millionaire .

I read half dozen reviews and only in talk mode, CDMA, does the BB surpass the iPhone. When using EV-DO it gets MUCH shorter battery life.

BTW, the guy who said the 8800 was 3G? Not true, it's GSM, but not 3G.

JoeL

As I pointed out (reading skills alert) it IS 3G. EV-DO is considered 3g, but for the purposes of comparing one to the other, when the 3G is in use talk time drops off precipitously. And you can't talk and surf at the same time. So when talking, yes, as stated, the 8830 gets better battery life than the iPhone, but when used as a mobile browser or for other digital data content, the battery life is considerably lower than the iPhone.

Your complaint was that the BB 3Gs weren't in the comparison and as pointed out there is no AT&T 3G BB, while the Verizone/Sprint flavor uses CDMA/EV-DO which does not allow simultaneous surfing and talking like the iPhone does. If used as an iPhone is used (I guess by talking a bit, then hanging up and surfing a bit, then . . . you get the picture) then the battery life is less, even based on Blackberry's own specs. Worse when reviewers got their hands on it.

This can't be that hard to figure out.

JoeL

I'll add that my 1st gen iPhone's battery use to last me two days. Now with the 2.0 software it only manages about 6 hours. If I disable some features then I'm able to squeeze out a full day.

Point being that the new phone's battery life isn't so different than the old version.