Alligator Belly           Gadgets and Technology

With the 2.0 release of the iPhone firmware and the launch of the App Store a day earlier, Alligator could not wait to upgrade his phone. As soon as the firmware was out on Friday, July 11th, Alligator plugged his iPhone into the computer and was able to the get the new firmware after a lot of clicking on the update button. Finally after crawling through the “Could not access iTunes Store” error message, the iPhone was back up and running with the 2.0 firmware.

Alligator had to hit the road soon so he downloaded a couple of free apps/games while on the road. In the evening, about 8 hours later that day, the iPhone was running out of battery which was pretty unusual as the iPhone had never before run out of battery unless of course it had not been charged overnight. Alligator thought since he was messing around with his iPhone and the new apps the whole day, that might have caused to iPhone to drain the battery. The next day after a full charge overnight the iPhone’s battery level was dropping rapidly again and looking into the usage menu in the iPhone the standby time was equal to the usage time. So Alligator turned off the phone and rebooted it. After the reboot Alligator kept a close watch on the usage time and it seemed back to normal. Soon after Alligator knew who was the culprit. It had to be one of the free apps that Alligator loaded into the iPhone. The app might not be closing correctly and eating up CPU cycles on the iPhone even when it should be asleep.

Alligator puts on his detective hat and tries to launch all the 10+ apps one by one and kept a watch on the usage. Unfortunately the usage times seem to normal. Thinking the iPhone just needed a reboot Alligator goes back to using his iPhone as usual and uses the iPod to listen to some music while surfing the web in Safari. Just to be sure the iPhone is acting normal Alligator checks the usage after some inactivity and the usage times are speeding up again. Frustrated Alligator tries to search on the web and finds nothing. Then he goes through Safari and finds that it has 3 pages open. One of the pages happens to http://www.wunderground.com. Suddenly the light bulb goes on and Alligator closes the wunderground.com page since it has a auto refresh script on it. Voila the usage times are back to normal after the wunderground page had been closed.

Now for the million dollar question: Is Safari remaining active even though the phone is asleep a feature or a bug? Please post your valuable comments below.