iPhone Battery Charging Experiment
By: R. Renée Bembry
Which Works Best Car Charger or Household A.C. Outlet?
First I must talk a little about my iPhone because it really is lovable. It is also deserving of the experiment I decided to conduct on its battery. I figured other iPhone users would be interested in receiving the information I uncovered on the battery charging times.
To begin with, before I received an iPhone as a gift, getting one was not on my radar. That fact was that I had deemed the old phone that was replaced by the iPhone sufficient to meet my needs. After all, it did the job of placing and receiving calls as well as sending and displaying text messages, photos, and videos. It had a clock to keep me abreast of time and performed a few other functions I cared about. But then, I do love old phones!
After receiving the iPhone I didn’t really know what to do with it since its capabilities were such a far cry from the simplicity of the phone it replaced. As users know, iPhones are much more like computers than simple cell phones with all the applications and abilities to share photos, videos, calendars and so much more. This meant I had to figure out how to do all these things. I had to learn about apps and determine which ones I wanted or needed and for that matter, how many I wanted to deal with or utilize whether or not I wanted or needed functions any particular app had to offer.
In the meantime, I also needed to keep the phone charged. This was no different from maintaining charges on my previous phones and thus came as a no brainier. What was different, however, was that in the interim of learning about the phone, I found myself taking a trip lasting roughly 500 miles. Of course, I knew it would be a good idea to take along the iPhone car charger to assure my battery did not completely lose its charge and die. So, that’s exactly what I did and when the battery got to the point where indeed it needed recharging due to all the fun I had using it on the return trip, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to find out how quickly the vehicle charger worked compared to at-home a.c. outlet wall chargers. I had wondered about this many times even when I had less advanced cell phones.
As a result, I decided to conduct an experiment. The idea was to plug the phone charging adapter into the cigarette lighter as one usually does when using a cell phone car charger. I would check the phone charging percentages every 10 minutes while using the vehicle charger and keep a tally of the charge progress. Later, when at home, I would use my iPhone enough to bring the battery charge down to the same starting point as while on the road so that I could recharge the phone using the a.c. outlet and compare the to sets of stats.
My results and conclusions for the charge are listed and explained below.
>>> Think you can guess which charged fastest before reading the results? >>>
Battery Charging Tally for Vehicle Adapter
12:04 at 47%
12:14 at 52%
12:24 at 55%
12:28 at 57%
12:38 at 60%
12:48 at 64%
12:58 at 70%
1:08 at 75%
* 1:12 stopped driving
1:18 at 81%
1:28 at 86%
1:38 at 91%
1:48 at 95%
1:58 at 98%
** 2:08 at 99%
** 2:18 at 99%
** 2:28 at 99%
Should iPhone batteries charge faster? For the most part, charging took 10 minutes per 5-7% charging progress in a Titan truck. The closer the progress came to 100%, however, the more the charging percentages faltered per 10-mimute increments.
* At 12:24 the charge was at 55% and I realized using phone while charging during second ten minutes may have slowed progress. I turned phone off and resumed observing charging percentages at 12:28. Charge was 57%.
** Checked several times after charged reached 99% but for some reason it would not register 100%. Never figured that out… Overall it took roughly 2 hours and 24 minutes for the battery charge to rise from 47% to 99%.
Due to traveling and needing info stored on the iphone I had to utilize the phone a few times for a few minutes. When I realized I the iPhone stop watch but could not use it because I wanted the phone to remain turned off. I had to randomly turn on the phone when I believed time was up to check the time. At 12:38 the charge stood at 60% which was lower than I had expected. I decided to compare truck charging time to A.C. sockets charging time.
Last couple of percentages driving through town took longer than other charge time perhaps because I was traveling at a slower mile per hour speed than when on the freeway. Whether or not this impacted charging time and perhaps prevented the battery to reach 100% in the vehicle charger I do not know.
Battery Charging Tally for A.C. Outlet
5:55 at 47%
6:00 at 52%
6:05 at 57%
6:10 at 63%
6:15 at 69%
6:20 at 75%
6:25 at 80%
6:30 at 85%
6:35 at 89%
6:40 at 92%
6:45 at 95%
6:50 at 97%
6:55 at 98%
7:00 at 99%
7:04:30 at 100%
Overall it took 1 hour and 9 minutes for the battery charge to rise from 47% to 100%. No doubt, the home a.c. outlet charged the iPhone battery a lot faster than the vehicle charger managed. The home outlet charger also maintained a more steady charging sequence from start to finish.
I checked the phone every 30 seconds to get the final reading (100%) after noticing the time per each percentage number increase had dropped to roughly one numeral per five minutes. Something told me the 100% mark would be reached prior to exactly another five minutes. It took four and a half minutes to go from 99% to 100%.
Initially, I was thinking of using the iPhone timer to help keep track of time if I could set it to beep every ten minutes, but when preparing to conduct the at-home experiment, it turned out to be a better idea to use the laptop computer clock.
Using the laptop meant I wouldn’t have to check the iPhone until certain the increments I set had arrived from one increment to the next. I decided to go with five minute increments because I figured smaller point checks would provide a clearer idea of how long it takes to reach smaller percentage marks.