All of the typical media outlets are talking about all of the reasons to buy one of the new iPhones - 3G, GPS, sleeker design, flush headphone jack etc, and all of these new features are great. However, it's a bit strange to me that no one is really focussed on the iPhone 3G's best new feature: the greatly improved battery life.

As a happy iPhone owner, the only major complaint I could wager about my current iPhone is the battery life. Talk/Standby time is fine, but I only get a couple hours of internet browsing over Edge, or a couple hours of watching videos. I make heavy use of my iPhone, which typically means that by the end of the day it's dying for a charge, but sometimes I go two days without having to worry about it.

Now this doesn't sound like too much of a hassle, except when you're on business trips as often as I am and you can only watch one movie on a four hour flight, or you have to conserve battery power by cutting down your web browsing time on long trips.

The good news: the new iPhone has at least double the battery life of the first generation iPhone... and over 3G to boot! Now we'll see if "real world" use brings these numbers down, but in my experience Apple is pretty conservative in their estimates.

All of that said, the battery life of my current phone isn't such a huge problem that I'm going to buy a 3G iPhone right away. I'm actually going to wait until a 32GB model comes out, which shouldn't be too far off considering the fact that they already have a 32GB iPod Touch.