10 Jul 9 Tips to get more battery life out of your iPhone
With great computing power comes great battery drain.
While we all love the apps, the ability to browse the internet, watch videos, take photos and access our emails, one of the ongoing flaws of having a computer in your pocket, is the short battery life. It’s times like these I miss my (now seemingly ancient) Nokia 6300, which lasted for 3 days without needing a re-charge.
To give your iPhone a bit more juice, checkout the following tips:
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Lower The Brightness of Your Screen
The brighter the screen, the heavier the strain on the battery. So, one way you can extend battery life of your iPhone is to reduce the brightness of the screen. You can do this by going to Settings > Brightness and then dragging the slider to the left to lower the default screen brightness. You can also set your screen to ‘auto-brightness’, which will allow the screen to adjust its brightness based on current lighting conditions. Go to Settings > Brightness and set Auto-Brightness to On.
Use Wi-Fi/ Turn Off 3G When You Can
When you use 3G, your smartphone requires a significant amount of battery power to be able to search for a data signal. Instead of using 3G to download apps, call using Skype or browse the internet, try to use Wi-Fi where you can and switch off 3G data when you are not using it.
Block GPS Tracking In Apps
Odds are, there are quite a few apps on your iPhone that include automatic GPS location and tagging such as Maps, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. When running these apps, your phone will be working frantically to locate you, which certainly attributes to battery drain. If you don’t need your friends on Facebook, followers on Instagram or Twitter to know where you are, keep GPS switched off.
To turn off GPS, go to Settings > General > Location Services.
Turn Off Your iPhone’s “Push” and “Fetch”
Some applications from the App Store use the Apple Push Notification service to alert you of new data. Applications that extensively rely on push notifications (such as instant messaging applications) may impact battery life.
To disable push notifications, go to Settings > Notifications and set Notifications to Off *
Additionally, applications such as Mail can be set to fetch data wirelessly at specific intervals. The more frequently email or other data is fetched, the quicker your battery may drain.
To fetch new data manually, from the Home screen choose Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Manually.
To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. **
*Note: that this does not prevent new data from being received when the application is opened. Also, the Notifications setting will not be visible if you do not have any applications installed that support push notifications.
**Note that this is a global setting and applies to all applications that do not support push services.
Keep Notifications In Check
To improve battery standby time, limit your app notifications to only those apps you actually need. That means saying “no” to requests for notifications from games and other apps that request the feature — unless you know the alerts are important. Notifications can be granularly controlled in the Notifications section of the Settings app.
Turn Off Bluetooth
For those of you who rarely use Bluetooth, turning Bluetooth off is another great way to increase your battery life.
To do this, go to Settings > General > Bluetooth and set Bluetooth to Off.
Turn Off Equalizer
If you use your iPhone as a music player, chances are you may have utilised the Equalizer to adjust playback to increase bass, decrease treble etc. This contributes to battery drain, as these adjustments are done on the fly, which requires extra battery power. You can turn off Equalizer to conserve battery life, if you don’t mind forgoing a richer playback experience in favour of longer battery life.
To turn Equalizer off, go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Off.
Note: if you’ve added EQ to songs directly in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ on the iPhone to Flat in order to have the same effect as Off because iPhone keeps your iTunes settings intact. Go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Flat.
Upgrade to iOS 5.1
If you haven’t already, it would be a great idea to upgrade your handset to iOS 5.1. As part of the release notes, Apple have stated that with this update they fixed some of the issues affecting battery life to try and improve it. While for the most part upgrading to iOS5.1 has improved battery life for iOS devices, there are reports that the update has not resolved battery life issues for all users. It’s worth updating your iOS device to 5.1 regardless, you never know, the update may fix battery life bugs.
Monitor Usage
If you want to determine whether your efforts to increase battery life are working, you can access usage statistics.
Go to Settings > General > Usage.
Under the “Time since last full charge” heading you’ll see two items:
- Usage: Amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.
- Standby: Amount of time iPhone has been powered on since its last full charge, including the time the phone has been asleep.
Maintaining Your iPhone Battery
While on the topic of batteries we thought we would include an additional tip regarding the battery’s lifespan (I.e .the total amount of time your battery will last before it must be replaced).
All models of the iPhone use a lithium-based battery. It is important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally to help extend the overall lifespan of the battery. To do this, you should do at least one charge cycle per month, which includes charging the battery to 100% then completely running it down.
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Have we missed something? Post additional tips on extending battery life below in the comments!