Slightly OT - Apple OS4 on 2G Touch ...

Oh, heh, you Apple people. We've had that for decades with Microsoft. About time you got on board.

Jeff

--
?Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.?
Frank Leahy, Head coach, Notre Dame 1941-1954

http://www.stay-connect.com

How do you arrive at me being an "Apple person" , Jeff ??? :-\

Nothing could actually be further from the truth. I run exclusively Windoze based machines for both home and business, as does the whole family, and am well aware of the pitfalls of upgrades and patches. I have but one Apple device - my iPod Touch - which I use for portable music, video and assorted useful apps and games. I have been very happy with it, as has my wife, my daughter and her husband with theirs. It has always done 'exactly as it says on the can', and up until now, I have had no complaint with any aspect of its workings, except perhaps with the fact that it needs to have a very close relationship with its own copy of iTunes on its host machine. This program is at best 'quirky', and takes some getting used to, but seems to work pretty fair, once you get your head around it.

Anyways, bit of an update. Left another couple of hours, by this evening, the indicated battery level was down at 30%. So without doing anything else, I went into "settings", and turned off the wifi, then put it back to sleep, and just left it for another two hours. Lo ! When I returned and checked it again a few minutes ago, the battery level had crept back up to 45%, so it looks like the wifi transmitter being continuously active, is the answer to why it is rinsing the battery. So the next question is, have Apple done this for some (in their mind) good reason - perhaps something to do with one of the new 'features' in OS4 - or is it an oversight that they will correct with a patch ? Perhaps 3Gs don't suffer. I understand that the machine architecture is significantly different between the two.

Either way, I will now do some more checking by charging it right up, and leaving the wifi switched off, and seeing if we are back to the original battery life. A bit inconvenient, but I guess it will do for the time being, until they produce a patch to correct it - if they do ...

Arfa

Seems odd, but... is there a chance that the "location services" were enabled? On many devices running the Apple OS, "Assisted GPS" is used to keep track of the current location: this can use a real GPS chip if there's one on-board, or pull location information from the cellphone system (if on-board and enabled), or [I gather] use the current WiFi base station's to deduce location from the information Google gleaned when they ran their Google Streets photo-cars around.

I wouldn't think that location services would normally be a feature used on an iPod, but since this device uses the same OS as the iPhones, perhaps the feature was turned on accidentally during the upgrade, and your device was trying to figure out just where it is?

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Not me.

Is yours jailbroken or stock? If jailbroken, there's a possibility that they may be problems. Too soon to tell.

I have an iPod Touch 2G (not jailbroken) and did the update Tues evening. The only problem I had was that Google Calendar and Gmail wouldn't work, because the Google servers were totally overloaded with all the iOS 4 updates. If you're carrying a huge amount of Google Apps data on your iPod Touch, it might have been set to push data every 15 mins, failing, and retrying endlessly. It started working today so I would suggest you give it a 2nd chance.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS

I wrote this in about 1995, in honor of the rather ugly and failure prone Windoze 3.1 to Win 95 upgrade cerimony.

Ninety Five fits on my disk. I read the docs, there is no risk. Fully tested and well planned. Just type the words that they command. Answer questions one by one. Are you sure? You're almost done. Pull the CD from the slot. It all worked fine, and thanks a lot. But with a reboot and my dismay, All my programs went away.

The other Jeff...

If only they would pay my time, to write the docs in verse and rhyme.

Actually, all of my XP and Vista to Windoze 7 updates have gone very smoothly. After the Vista botch, MS seems to have gotten a clue.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS

There is no iPod Touch 3GS. Only the 3G.

Also, it's iOS 4, not OS 4.

-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 #

snipped-for-privacy@cruzio.com # AE6KS

There is no GPS in the iPod Touch. Also, no camera and no microphone.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Interesting you say that, Dave. I have The Weather Channel desktop application on it, and that does make use of location services, via the wifi. I did have a look at that last night, and it was turned on, so I set it to off, so together with switching the wifi itself off for the test, that makes it sort of doubly disabled. If the battery holds up normally today, I will try switching the wifi back on tomorrow, but leave the location services off. Thanks for the suggestion.

Arfa

Ah, I see you haven't taken your anti-pedant meds today Jeff ! :-)

I was of course, referring to the 3G iPod in the plural - as in "three gees", which would be why I used a small "s". As to the name of the software, it was OS4 I believe, until they publicly released it a few days ago, when it became "iOS4", which is more cumbersome to type. I knew what I meant. You apparently knew what I meant. Everyone else knew what I meant ...

Arfa

Not jailbroken. Just off-the-shelf vanilla. Has mostly just music on it. Some third party games and apps, some paid for, some freebies. Most have been on there for a long time, with the exception of a game I put on there last week called "wake the box". It's a lot of fun - try it. My wife has the same app, and she does not seem to be suffering this battery problem, so I don't think it's that. Anyway, it makes no use of the 'net or location services, and doesn't seem to leave anything behind and running when you exit, according to the system monitor utility that I put on there (after the problem started occurring, so not being caused by that app either).

I don't knowingly have huge amounts - if indeed any - Google Apps on it. Although thinking about it, I do have Google Earth, but it hasn't been opened since the update.

For the moment, I'm going to leave the wifi and location services switched off, and see what happens. If that is ok, then I will put the wifi back on, and see how it goes then, and report back.

Arfa

I updated mine (2g 16gb ipod) but don't seem to have a battery problem.

One thing I did notice after the update, check Settings -> Notifications and make sure that is off. If enabled, it will keep the wifi always on, even when sleeping. I never used that push notification stuff and always had it off, seems like after the update, it was enabled by default.

That error with the backup/restore is a common story, seems like a lot of people ran into it, including myself. The apps and settings (including mail and wifi) all were intact but lost all the music, playlists and videos. Plus it took an abnormal amount of time to end up in a crash/error, better than 3 hours.

I don't think you can go back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3, even if you find the ipsw, apple isn't "signing" them to be installed.

The main comment I wanted to make was, it just could be a battery fail problem. 3 people I know with the iPods (two 3rd gen, one 2nd) within the last year, meaning the two within 4-6 months of purchase, the battery just failed on them. They charge it overnight, next morning it only has like

20-30%, goes empty in 15 minutes. If it's within the one year warranty, apple will swap it out with a new unit, if you do the song and dance to make an appointment for the "genius bar".

There wasn't any warning with any of them, just fails instantly.

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

Thanks for all the info Bruce. I will look into the "notifications" thing. So far, 6 hours after it came off charge, it's still reading 100%, which is how it was before the upgrade, so I definitely think that it is a wifi issue, and not the battery itself. The annoying thing is, that there is very little new functionality in iOS 4 that is runnable on a 2G, and some things that actually no longer work as they did. It's a pity that when iTunes informs you that there is new software available, it doesn't then make it clear that if you are below a 3G device, you might want to opt to just leave everything as it is. About the only new thing I can see, is being able to bundle apps into desktop folders. Well, I've lived without that since I've had it, and I doubt that I'll be using it now ...

Arfa

On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:44:54 +0100, Arfa Daily ??o??:

I had a similar situation with my Blackberry. When they updated the OS the bluetooth suddenly ate the battery in about 10 hours. Before the phone could go for a week on standby. So I ended up disabling the BT until needed. About 3 months passed and there was a software update that addressed the BT issue and it worked. I was screwing around with my sister's ITouch yesterday. Nice little unit for sure. But now I own a Dell Mini and no longer desire an ITouch for myself. I wouldn't have been happy with something that was only half a computer anyway.

Apple OS4 on 2G Touch. Isn't that an Apple product running Apple software, or did they sub that out to Microsoft? ;-)

Jeff

--
?Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.?
Frank Leahy, Head coach, Notre Dame 1941-1954

http://www.stay-connect.com

#chuckle# Nicely done!

I remember the Doonesbury strips on that subject...

"It's printing out a list of demands... it's dissing my machine!"

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Well, yeah, I suppose that is one product that I happen to own, but it's a bit of a leap from there to making me an "Apple person", isn't it ? ...

Arfa

Well, I reckon that I've just about got it pinned down now. Unit idled asleep all day, and battery went down about 2% or so, so that was back to normal. So this evening, I turned the wifi back on, and connected to the TV news site that I use, then exited that app, connected to the iTunes store and had a little browse, then exited that app. I then left the unit for another couple of hours, and rechecked. The battery was just as I had left it, so the wifi had correctly gone back to sleep, when the online apps were exited. A while ago, I started up The Weather Channel desktop app, which I suspect is at the bottom of the trouble, and accessed some data. Now this app asks for permission to determine your location, via the 'net, by making use of the router data that Google have stolen from you, as they drove past your house with their camcars.. I usually just let the app go ahead and do this. Tonight, it had a bit of a cry that it couldn't ask me, because "Location Services" were turned off on the iPod. Having looked at a weather forecast, I exited the app, and again, all seems to be well.

So, I'm now pretty sure that the issue is to do with this location determining malarky. If for whatever reason, it doesn't manage to complete the operation, it looks as though it keeps trying, which would be fair enough whilst the app is running. To be honest, I don't know if this has ever worked, because I don't actually know why the app needs to know where I am. Assuming that it doesn't complete, and keeps trying, it looks as though with iOS 4, the operation doesn't get cancelled when you exit the app, so the wifi transmitter stays active, rinsing your battery in a few hours. Presumably, this is an oversight / bug in iOS 4 that the previous version didn't have. I can't see any reason for the wifi transmitter staying active after an app has been dumped. As soon as you exit, any wifi activity associated with the app, should be immediately tidied up, and dropped.

I think that for the moment, I'm just going to keep location services shut off, and if I load up any apps that definitely need it, decide on a per use basis whether to re-enable it.

Arfa

So much for that theory.

Google Earth should not cause problems. It's only Google Mail and possibly Calendar that might need to sync huge amounts of data.

iPhone and iPod touch: Understanding Location Services

The iPod Touch does NOT have GPS or 3G data. However, it can use Wi-Fi to obtain locations. I usually leave location services off on mine to save electrons. I just turned it on, fired up Google Maps while indoors, and it found me within about 300ft. Nice. However, there's no additional drain other than Wi-Fi. When the iPod Touch goes to snooze, the Wi-Fi goes into standby. I don't think this is the source of your mystery discharge.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS

Incidentally, the iPhone and iPod Touch Wi-Fi based location services uses Skyhook:

which uses a database of known wi-fi access points. It found my office location because I had registered my access point long ago.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS