One thing that Apple has always paid attention to is the Battery Life in their devices. Most of them, particularly their laptops, far surpass the industry average when it comes to giving you lots of juice. In this post, I will mention some of the ways I, and many others, have managed to get more life out of their iPhones devices.
If you've used your iPhone for a few days, you may have noticed that the Battery life is not as good as it was when you first got it. There are many reasons for this and the main culprits include:
- Misbehaving apps that keep turning location services on or waking up your phone, trying to tell you something
- Changed screen brightness and email sync settings - a brighter screen and syncing more often
- Your phone trying Low reception areas
- Syncing of large files (pictures, books, data etc.) from your phone to the "cloud"
All of these things use battery life. All of these things are also what makes your smartphone "smart".
If you feel that your battery life is more important to you, then the best way you can get it back is by effectively disabling all the syncing, brightnesses changes and bad settings that have been pushed onto your phone by rogue Apps.
Doing so is simple (although perhaps tedious):
- Uninstall any apps you may have recently installed. In particular you can save a lot of juice by uninstalling data hungry apps that you don't really need/use such as:
- VOIP Apps (Viber, Dell Voice etc.)
- Apps that upload your pics to the internet (this include iCloud syncing, calendar syncing etc.)
- Disable "notification" settings for apps that you don't really need notifications from using: SETTINGS > NOTIFICATIONS
- Make your phone dumber: Turn off services that you don't need. Things that you can turn off from SETTINGS include: Location services (no GPS if you do this!), Siri (if you happen to have it, I don't use this much anyway)
- Prevent uploading of "Documents and Data" to iCloud when you're using cellular data: Do so from SETTINGS > ICLOUD > DOCUMENTS & DATA > turn off USE CELLULAR
- Prevent applications like Skype from signing you automatically from SETTINGS > SKYPE > SIGN IN AUTOMATICALLY
If you want to do all of the above, then you can try resetting all your settings from: SETTINGS > GENERAL > RESET ALL SETTINGS and this will maintain all you apps, but delete all the settings for the apps (this includes Mail, Google Calendar/Contact Syncing etc.). So next time you open an app it'll ask you if you wan't to use Location Services, notifications etc., and you can only allow a select few to access things like location services.
As far as I know, disabling things and resetting are the only ways of improving battery life on the iPhones (apart from draining the battery fully and recharging it again). Let me know of any other methods you come up with.
