Top 10 iPhone Battery Saving Tips

If you haven’t already read my previous post regarding my iPhone battery experiment, for one weekend (Fri, Sat, Sunday) I reduced my iPhone to the simple role of making phone calls and receiving SMS messages. The task was to see if I could get the device to last a weekend of normal phone use without needing re-charged.

Today, I’ll summarize the results and talk about some great battery saving tips for those of you with iPhones that may occasionally require long-distance trips between charges.

Firstly, the phone made it. By 10:30pm on Sunday night I was left with 19% charge. Impressive enough, but it must be noted that I turned the phone off at night while I slept.

iphone battery saving tips

This shows that an iPhone can indeed be used for a weekend-long trip away from power, great news for festival goers, campers and hill walkers alike.

So how did I coax this extended marathon out of such a normally power hungry device like the iPhone?

1. Screen Brightness

Probably the most effective means of reducing power needs, turning the screen brightness all the way down goes a huge way to extending battery life. If nothing else, this should be your first port of call if your running low – but still need the other data services the device provides.

2. Turn off Wi-Fi

Fairly self-explanatory, but any time the device or any application requests a data connection the wifi is fired up to search for available networks. This is made worse in a situation where you are likely to be away from power as the antenna will be boosted and amplified when the device struggles to make a connection – further increasing power drain.

3. Disable Push Notifications

Push notifications generally work by keeping a persistent connection open to Apples servers. This causes CPU overhead and requires constant connection to a data service, sucking valuable volts in the process.

4. Disable 3G

3G networks are great for awesome data-rates but good old fashioned 2G wins hands down. In fact, using 2G over 3G can actually half the power used when making a call. Also, as 3G networks are generally more sparse than 2G the phone will constantly try and boost its 3G signal draining power.

5. Disable Email Fetch

Having emails arrive in your pocket is nice, but not entirely essential. Simply disable this to stop unnecessary data connections and save some juice.

6. Disable Bluetooth

As I’m sure its becoming clear by now, wireless connections drain power. While Bluetooth is an incredibly power-efficient wireless protocol, it’s hardly an essential when your out of power.

7. Disable Location services

Location services use a combination of GPS and carrier triangulation. Both of these methods put drain on power, neither of them are required to make phone calls. Not a big sacrifice, and a fairly attractive power saving.

8. Switch off in low signal areas

If your in the middle of nowhere and there isn’t a signal, don’t waste power trying to search for one. As I have mentioned power usage for any radio system is increased many times if the device has to continuously boost the signal both incoming and outgoing. If you are in a low signal area, the iPhone will boost the signal many times in an attempt to keep a working connection open.

9. Disable Vibrate

A tiny saving, but none the less helpful. Also, keeping the volume low may also help if your desperate. Apple also says to disable the iPod EQ. But seeing as your unlikely to be using the iPhone as anything other than essential communication by this point, I didn’t make a big deal out of it.