A lot of people are reporting problems with their iPhone battery life, especially with the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.
Here are some tips to get longer battery life on any iPhone simply by disabling some of the features of the iPhone.
You might think ‘but I don’t want to turn off any of the features on my iPhone’. Well, do you have every light and appliance in your house turned on all the time? It’s not the best use of energy to do so. Likewise it’s not necessary to have everything running on your iPhone at once either!
It’s a matter of compromising between convenience and battery life. My rule of thumb is that if I use something less than once a week, then I’m happy to turn it on manually, but for things I’m using every day, I generally leave them on.
Here is a list of things you can turn off.
Work your way down, turning things off. They are all found in the ‘Settings’ app on your iPhone.
1. Turn off LTE
WHERE: General – Cellular – Enable LTE
Turn off LTE unless you need the very fast speeds of the 4G network. This is especially true if you are NOT in an LTE area. Some people say this is because the phone is scanning looking for an LTE network even if it can’t find one.
2. Turn off most (but not all) location services
WHERE: Privacy – Location Services
Turn off every app that doesn’t need to know where you are. You probably want to leave “Find My iPhone” and “Maps” on as they really do need to know where you are to work. I leave on Camera as well – so it can tag a location for my photos – but I turn everything else off.
3. Turn of Automatic Mail Checking
WHERE: Mail, Contacts, Calendar – Fetch New Data
Turn ‘Push’ Off. Otherwise every single email comes to your phone individually and uses up power doing do.
Set Fetch to ‘Manually.’ This will then fetch all your mail at once when you open mail app. Or set it to the time interval that you want it to check if you’d prefer it to check automatically.
4. Turn Down Brightness
WHERE: Brightness and Wallpaper
Trun brightness down to half or a quarter – you’ll get used to it! And it still goes a bit brighter in the sun if you have ‘Auto brightness’ on.
5. Turn off auto-update of iCloud and Safari Bookmarks
WHERE: General – Cellular
Scroll down and under “Use Cellular Data for:” turn off iCloud Documents, Passbook Updates and Reading List.
This stops your iPhone updating all those things while you are out and about.
You can also turn off iTunes and FaceTime if you want.
6. Turn off Bluetooth (if you don’t use it)
WHERE: Bluetooth
Turn off Bluetooth unless you have a wireless headset or bluetooth device you use.
7. Turn off WiFi (if you don’t use it)
WHERE: Wi-Fi
Turn off wi-fi if you don’t need it.(eg If you are travelling in the car and are just using your iPhone on the phone network, then you don’t need wi-fi, or if you are wandering round and just want to use your phone as a phone and conserve battery life.)
8. Siri Raise to speak.
WHERE: General: Siri
Turn off Raise to speak – some people report this improves battery life. (Leave it on if you like this feature.)
9. Shut down unused apps.
WHERE: Double Press the main iPhone ‘home’ button – 4 apps will appear.
Press and hold one of these apps till you get the wobbles and then click the red buttons to quit the apps.
When you are finished press the ‘home’ button again, twice.
This is debated but some apps seem to still use battery life when they are in the background.
10. Turn off more location Services
WHERE: Settings: Privacy: Location Services: System Services
Disable some of these as I have done above.
As well as all this, the following might fix some bugs that could make your battery life worse:
1. Settings: Carrier: Automatic
Set to Off and select your carrier manually (Eg Telstra)
2. Settings: General: Reset: Network Settings
Reset Network Settings. Then flatten your battery totally and recharge. This one helped my iPhone battery life a lot for some reason – I don’t know why.
3. Restore your phone (last resort)
If Battery life is still bad, try this as a last resort:
Open iTunes, backup the phone, then restore the software.
If it’s still bad take your iPhone to a genius bar!
Other notes on battery life:
It doesn’t hurt to turn your phone off every couple of weeks just to reset it. Hold down the top ‘power’ button till it turns off. Then turn it on again.
For best battery life keep your phone as fully charged up as you can. Pop it on the charger at Morning Tea and Lunch etc. It doensn’t hurt to keep it on the charger all day even if it’s charged. It’s not good to let it get too flat – each full discharge does some damage to a Lithium Ion Battery. So keep it as full as you can.
This article at wired.com has some great information on battery life too.
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