Like the iPod, but unlike most cellphones, the iPhone lacks a removable battery. So you can’t carry a spare. But its battery life is excellent. In our tests, it got seven hours and 18 minutes of continuous talk time, while the Wi-Fi was on and email was constantly being fetched in the background. That’s close to Apple’s claim of a maximum of eight hours, and far exceeds the talk time claims of other smart phones, which usually top out at five and a half hours.
For continuous music playback, again with Wi-Fi on and email being fetched, we got over 22 hours, shy of Apple’s claim of up to 24 hours, but still huge.
In real life, of course, you will do a mix of these things, so the best gauge might be that, in our two-week test, the iPhone generally lasted all day with a typical mix of tasks.