Improve iPhone Battery Life
Have you noticed that your iPhone’s battery drains faster than you would like it to? There has been stories floating around that iOS 5.0.1 didn’t actually fix the battery issues, but even if this is true, there are things you can do increase your battery life. Many other articles that touch in this subject mention things like turning the screen brightness all the way down, or even turning off all push notifications; but we aim to bring more practical yet proven methods to increase your battery life to the table.
1. Manage Screen Brightness
Slightly turning down the screen brightness might not make a difference to you, but it will definitely make a noticeable difference to your battery life. The screen accounts for over 80% of the total battery usage at full brightness, so minor adjustments to the brightness can significantly increase your battery life.
2. Manage Push Notifications
Push notifications function by holding a constant connection with the server it’s pushing content from, so having 20 or more push notifications enabled will drain your battery, as you could imagine. Although turning off all push notifications will significantly increase battery life, it is not practical, since it defeats the purpose of owning a smart phone.
Many games, like Angry Birds and Need for Speed, ask to send you push notifications. The best rule is to disallow push notifications on games, since most of the notifications are special offers from the creator of the game. Things of this nature would fall under the spam category, and not only will disabling these allow you to use your device uninterrupted, it will also save you precious battery life. Also, unless you need an app to send you push notifications, the best bet is always turning them off, since you can view those notifications by opening that application.
To disable push notifications for an app in iOS 4 and below, navigate to Settings then notifications and turn Sounds, Alerts, and Badges off as shown below.
3. Disable Spotlight Search
One of the most unused features on iOS is Spotlight Search. Unfortunately, Spotlight Search consumes both battery life and memory by building and retaining indexes. To disable Spotlight Search, navigate to Settings, General, then Spotlight Search and uncheck all of the available options. NOTE: Even if you disable Spotlight Search, the search bar will still be present on the home screen, but will only give you the option of searching the web if you type something in.
4. Occasionally Reset Network Settings
As you hop around from place to place, the WiFi access points you connect to are remembered and can consume battery life when running through all those references when the device searches for WiFi (every time you unlock your device). Resetting your network settings will erases all stored WiFi passwords as well. To reset your network settings, navigate to Settings>General>Reset, then select Reset Network Settings.
5. Choose A Wallpaper With More Black
This is unusual, but proven to work on 4th Generation and higher devices with the IPS (In Plane Switching) display. The reason for this is quite simple, the IPS display uses less power to display black than any other color. As I mentioned in #1, the screen accounts for over 80% of battery usage at full brightness, so you will see a difference, although not significant (due to the fact that you are only on the home screen for a limited time), by doing this.
That’s all the tips we have for now, but we’ll keep adding to this list as we find some more practical tips on improving your iDevice’s battery life.
Last updated by at .