iPhone are battery draining beasts and can die within a day if you’re not careful. Here’s some quick tips to better maximize your battery.
Turn Of All Unnecessary Radios
Turn off the Wifi, turn off the Bluetooth and turn off the 3G. The iPhone’s wireless connections suck down a lot of juice and it’s easy to run it bone dry when you have every radio on. The problem is keeping them on when they’re simply not needed. Turning off Bluetooth when you’re not making handsfree calls and shutting off Wifi when out in the field and on 3G will save a lot of your battery for more useful tasks like calling and surfing the web.
Turning of 3G isn’t a must and running on the slower 2G protocol will help eke out a few extra hours of battery. I’d only recommend turning off 3G if you’re not surfing the Internet constantly and don’t need the faster speeds. If you want a balance between speed and energy conservation, find a Wifi hotspot and enable Airplane mode but keep the Wifi active. Just don’t forget shut Wifi off when you leave.
Push Notification & Location
Aside from keeping the iPhone’s many wireless radios alive, the biggest battery drainer will be Push Notification and Location services.
Push Notifications, which has an open connection between your iPhone and a server to push data drains the battery quickly. Location services, which the iPhone’s GPS and position functionality are a massive drain even when used in short bursts. Apps that use both of these services in tandem will drain your iPhone’s battery in the background and you may not even know it. To turn both of these battery draining features off, go to settings on your iPhone then choose Location Services to either disable this feature on an App per App basis or disable entire OS access to it. To disable Push Notification, go to Settings then Notifications to disable the feature.
Drain The Battery
Sometimes the source of your battery woes might be bigger than your energy guzzling Apps.
Draining the battery and charging it up is called calibrating it. This gives the iPhone a much more accurate reading of what 100%, 50% and 25% of your battery means. A battery that has yet to be properly calibrated will shut off even if there is enough energy to keep the device alive for another 30 minutes or an hour. This same method also works with laptops and other devices powered by a battery.
