IPhone battery life
David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist, passed on the following hints from an Apple store Genius on how to make an iPhone battery hold its charge for longer.
- 1. "Push" email
Your phone may be checking your email accounts on a frequent schedule. Switch off this "Push" feature; set it to Manually instead (in Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars->Fetch New Data). After this, the phone will only check your email when you run the mail app.
- 2. GPS checks
Look at Settings ->General->Location Services. This shows which apps on your phone are working out your location using GPS and triangulation. If you don't need them to do that, turn them off.
- 3. Notifications
Next, try Settings -> Notifications to see which apps are allowed to display pop-up notifications. These use power to monitor what else is going on. If you don't need them either, turn them off too.
- 4. Background apps
Yes, we all thought background apps are meant to be suspended to save power, but this Genius turned them off anyway. Double-press the Home button to open the multitasking app switcher. Hold your finger down on any icon until they all start wiggling. Tap the little [x] close boxes to manually quit open apps.
Result: the day after making the above changes, an iPhone 3GS battery was still at 80% by 5 p.m., compared to 5% the day before before.
Credits
Summarised from David Pogue's blog, with his permission.
External links
- Four Ways to Make Your Battery Last Longer - David Pogue's blog in the New York Times, May 23, 2011.