Some Tips on how to Increase battery Life

The iPhone is great device that can do so much for you – beyond just being a cell phone, it can be your dedicated iPod and gaming device as well as your PDA and all-around communicator to handle text messaging, e-mail, and instant messaging. Given this, the chances you’ll end up using it a lot throughout the day can be pretty high, and unless you’re constantly near a power source and can charge its battery, your iPhone may run out of juice before the day is over. This installment in our Learning iPhone series will give you some tips on how to increase your iPhone’s battery life.

Some of the battery maximization tips we’ll talk about are pretty extreme in that they could hamper how you typically use your iPhone, while others are minor and may not even be noticeable to you. We’ll categorize our tips along this continuum.

Mostly unnoticeable

Screen brightness

The iPhone’s default screen brightness out of the box is right at the 50% mark. If you haven’t touched it since you first got your iPhone, this could be a good area in which to start since it takes more power to keep the screen bright. Move that slider marker to the left to decrease the brightness to a tolerable level.

Switching the Auto-Brightness setting to on can also help save battery life, contrary to what you may think. This controls an ambient light sensor on the face of the iPhone under the screen to the left of the earpiece speaker on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G models. When the sensor detects a lot of ambient light, it will turn the screen’s backlight up (to the maximum you set using the slider bar) to ensure you can read it in brighter lighting. When the sensor detects less ambient light, it will turn the screen’s backlight down so you’re not staring into a bright light when you’re in the dark. Powering the sensor takes less energy than powering a backlight on a higher brightness level, so it can help you improve battery life.

Location Services

If you spend most of your time in the same places – home, school, or work – and don’t need your iPhone to know where it is all the time via its GPS chip, turning off Location Services can help conserve juice. This switch is in the Settings/General menu and it will switch off the iPhone’s GPS chip. One less thing to power equals more battery life!

The downside to turning Location Services to off is that any app you open that uses the GPS chip will always give you an error message once it tries to find the iPhone’s current location. If you don’t use apps like this often, it probably won’t be a big deal to you. If you do, this may be one of the battery-saving techniques you skip.

Wi-Fi vs. 3G

If you have a Wi-Fi network at home, school or work, make sure your iPhone is set up to connect to it automatically. Browsing the web or any other activity that requires internet connectivity will go both faster and consume less power over Wi-Fi than over a 3G network. The iPhone’s 3G radio consumes a lot of power to connect to a local cell tower and send and receive data - more so than the Wi-Fi radio does.

Volume

Like to listen to music on your iPhone? If you do, keeping the volume down will go a long way to preserving your battery life. It takes less power to put out music at a lower volume than it does at a higher volume, particularly if you’re using high-end 3rd-party headphones with high impedance (the higher the impedance rating for a pair of headphones, the more energy it takes to power them).

Even adjusting the ringtone volume can have an effect, albeit a limited one unless your iPhone is ringing with incoming calls constantly.

Noticeable

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

If you only use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in certain situations, such as connecting to a home Wi-Fi network or using a Bluetooth headset only while you’re driving, you can turn off the iPhone’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios when they’re not in use, which will conserve the battery. The trick is that you’ll need to remember when to turn them back on when you need them. Depending on how good you are at this, it could be a mild nuisance to a full-blown annoyance if you’re doing something like making a call using your Bluetooth headset and then realize your iPhone won’t connect to it after you’re already traveling 75 mph on the expressway.

Fetch/Push vs. Manual

Instead of setting your iPhone to check for new emails on a fixed schedule or via Push if you have a push-enabled email account, check for new email manually. This will prevent your iPhone from making a connection to the internet/server on its own throughout the day. Checking for email manually lets you determine when you want this extra power expenditure to occur, and the less frequently you do it, the longer your battery will last. Of course, this can be very inconvenient if you use your iPhone a lot during the day to keep tabs on your work or personal email and you prefer to be notified of new messages as soon as they arrive.

Potentially annoying but highly effective

3G vs. EDGE

This tip is a little extreme since you probably want to get the most out of your data plan, particularly since you can be paying $30 or more for it per month depending on your carrier. Those of you who upgraded from a first-generation iPhone in the U.S. may feel this way the most since AT&T hit you with a $10 increase in the monthly data plan cost when you moved to the iPhone 3G/3GS. However, as we mentioned before, 3G radios consume a lot of power to connect to towers and send and receive data and turning off 3G on your iPhone can make a big difference in battery life. If you forget to turn it back on, you’ll suffer through EDGE network speeds that will slow your internet browsing to a crawl. Fortunately, turning it back on is easy enough through a virtual switch, but turning it on and off throughout the day could get wearisome.

Airplane Mode

This is probably the most extreme suggestion we have, but it can work wonders for your battery life. It’s most painless when you’re in an area where you’re not supposed to be using a cell phone to begin with, such as on a plane. But, if you rely on your iPhone as your main method of communication while you’re out and about to make and receive calls and check email, this suggestion could be a no-go for you from the start. However, if you’re going to be in an area where there’s spotty network coverage or will be going to sleep and don’t want to be disturbed anyway, Airplane Mode can be a life saver when there’s no power outlet nearby.

Source: everythingicafe