Why I wasn’t planning on getting an iPhone3G, why I am now (well, as soon as the lines go down), and what changed my mind

So the launch of the iPhone3G has come and gone. The activation process was broke for several hours and frustrated lots of line waiters as they couldn’t manage to activate their shiny new hardware. While I was always skeptical of the whole in-store activation process, I didn’t think it would become this much of a train wreck. And a few days before the launch, after reading some reviews from the NYT and WSJ, I decided that I wouldn’t get the new iPhone. After some more research though, I’ve changed my mind.

The biggest reason I didn’t want to get the new phone was the decreased battery life. Various reviews from the internet have shown the decrease, in some cases dramatic, between the iPhone and iPhone 3G. Anandtech had a quick review showing that the original iPhone could play video for over 7 hours, the new phone only gets about 3 hours of video playback. Though I should note that with my iPhone, I never experienced that kind of battery longevity, it was always closer to 5 hours, and that was even in airplane mode. Three hours is close enough to be thought of as a problem – a cross country flight is 5.5 or 6 hours, and even if you factor out the taxi, takeoff, ascent up to 10,000′ (when you’re allowed to use electronics), the decent below 10,000′ and landing, that still is about 5 hours of time to watch movies and TV shows. The Mossberg review said that by the early afternoon, he was in the 20% warning zone and had to find a place to plug in. Though I’m still waiting to hear from a reviewer who put the phone in 2G mode to see how long the battery would last then (as well as in airplane mode).

So I did some research. After much googling, I found out that early in June 2008, Infineon announced its X-GOLD 61x series of GSM baseband chips. These chips are capable of HSPA (high speed downstream + upstream), and are fabricated on a smaller IC manufacturing process than the current series of chips being used in the iPhone3G (the X-GOLD 608 chip, formerly known as the S-GOLD-3H chip, per iFixIt.com). The current chip uses a 90nm fabrication process, has a separate PMU (power management unit) from the baseband processor and the RF chip, and has HSDPA at 7.2Mb/s down and only W-CDMA up at 384kb/s. The next generation, referred to as the XMM6180 platform, will offer HSPA at 7.2Mb/s down and 2.9Mb/s up as well as be fabricated on a 65nm process (which means it will consume much less power) and will have the PMU integrated into the baseband processor, for a total of two chips (baseband+rf) instead of three, saving that all-important circuit board area. The 61x baseband processor will also have an ARM11 core (the current baseband core has an ARM9 core) – though it is very important to note that this is not the CPU for the iPhone, there is a separate ARM11 core that is used as the phone’s CPU, rather this is the processing core for the baseband chip.

Then I found Infineon’s current roadmap. It shows that this X-GOLD 61x series of chips is sampling for testing now, but they wont be produced in mass quantities until the second half of 2009 – a year, possibly a year and a half from now.  This is an awfully long lead time for a chip – nearly a year to ship it in quantity if its sampling now? There is a small but distinct possibility that Apple and its 17B USD cash pile just happened to throw some bones at Infineon for the first quarter’s worth of production chips, paying a large portion of the amount due up front and in cash to guarantee their on-time delivery. I still think its a very unlikely situation though, if anything, Apple is probably riding Infineon’s ass to get the chip out sooner so they can be included in a September/October 2009 refresh of the iPhone3G. And maybe it could happen. But the lesson to take away from that is that there is a significant chance that the 2009 model iPhones may not have much better battery life that the current generation of iPhones. We might not even see a refresh, other than capacity to a 32GB version in 2009, with an update in early 2010 if Infineon doesn’t manufacture mass quantities until late H2 2009.

This is basically my rationale for buying an iPhone3G now. The sooner I buy the new phone, the sooner I’ll be eligible for an upgrade in 20 months (March 2010), when a new iPhone with much better battery life will be available.  The longer lasting iPhone probably wont show up until Fall 2009 or early 2010. So unless I plan on using this EDGE phone for the next 18 months (and pay $90 or so to get the battery replaced along the way) I might as well dive in.

And AT&T is planning on offering 20Mb/s (theoretical) speeds on their 3G Network by the end of 2009, probably by upgrading to HSPA+ (3GPP Release 7) and providing 42Mb/s carriers from the tower, though the end user isn’t likely to reach that speed – due to the length of time it will take to get HSPA+ chips into phones as well as that’s shared bandwidth between users, providing a single-user speed closer to 3Mb/s, which is still a great speed for mobile devices.