Fred's iPhone Battery-Saving Tips
This is a compendium of tips designed to help increase battery life on your
iPhone. Many of the tips may be applicable to iPads, too. The list
was started with tips extracted from Episode 243 of "Today in IOS," a podcast by
Rob Walch at http://tii.libsyn.com/.
Most of these tips involve changes to your iPhone's SETTINGS,
so open the Settings app first, then navigate to the subcategory mentioned in
each tip to make changes.
- Though you are unlikely to want to do this often,
putting your iPhone in AIRPLANE MODE (on) will shut off a lot of
power-draining stuff!
- If you don't need it to connect to earpieces, etc.,
turn BLUETOOTH off.
- Under GENERAL / ABOUT, scroll to the bottom, select
ADVERTISING, and turn LIMIT ADD TRACKING on.
- Under GENERAL / ABOUT, scroll to the bottom, select
DIAGNOSTICS & USAGE, and select Don't Send.
- Under GENERAL / SIRI, turn RAISE TO SPEAK off,
unless, of course, you like to use this feature.
- Under GENERAL / AUTO-LOCK, the sooner you lock,
the less battery you use.
- Under NOTIFICATION CENTER, check to make sure you need
all those apps notifying you of stuff. Turn off the ones you don't
need -- you can always turn notifications on later from within the apps or
from the bottom of this list.
- Under BRIGHTNESS & WALLPAPER, the lower you set
brightness, the less battery power you will use.
- Under PRIVACY, examine the list of applications using
LOCATION SERVICES and turn off those that you rarely use or you don't
care about their having location data. Many of these apps will ask to use
your location when initiated, if the service is turned off here.
- Under MAIL, CONTACTS, CALENDARS, under FETCH NEW DATA,
turn PUSH off (you will still get "notifications" from apps) and Fetch
to Manually if you don't use your mail services all the time. Less
frequent fetching increases battery life.
- Under PODCASTS, turn USE CELLULAR DATA off.
- Periodically close all open apps by pressing the
Home key twice to show the task list at the bottom of the screen, then hold
you finger on any task until the icons start jiggling, the keep clicking the
minus sign in the red circle for any app you aren't actively using. This will
close those apps, free up memory, and reduce battery usage. NOTE: Unlike
PCs, the iPhone's apps restart after rebooting, so simply rebooting does not
shut these apps down.
In my case, I couldn't stop my rapid battery drain.
The rep at the Apple store ran a test on my iPhone and said there was something
wrong with the software, not the battery; so I had to do a hard reboot of the
phone and reinitialize everything. He suggested, wisely I think, NOT to do
a restore, but rather to use the new phone option and rebuild everything.
That's a pain, because you have to create your own app folders again, but it
resolved my problem.
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