subject: How To Extend Your iPhone Battery Live [print this page] How To Extend Your iPhone Battery Live How To Extend Your iPhone Battery Live
Lower the brightness of your screen. Every iPhone has a pretty bright screen, but using that backlight used alot of battery power. I keep mine at around 23% brightness, but you can easily play with the settings to see what works bes., To adjust the screen brightness, go to settings/brightness and slide the control down to a setting that is good for you.
2. Check your email less frequently. The amount of time to wait before checking for new email is adjustable, and the less often you check, the less power you will use in the process. The iPhone offers settings of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, Hourly, and Manually. I usually set it for 30 minutes, with the knowledge that I can also always pull up the email client and manually check whenever it is convenient for me. However, you can set it for what works for you. It might be good to note that a longer polling period cuts down on potentially distracting email notifications as well as saving power from the notifications themselves (especially from the vibration alert). To adjust this setting, go to settings/mail and adjust the fetch time. Now, if you use a push email service, this will not be an option for you. But it has been reported that push services end up using more power, since they keep a connection open. This may be a tradeoff for the end user to decide.
3. Turn off the WiFi. Sure, it makes browsing faster to be connected to a good WiFi data source, but it uses more power in the process. Not only that, but leaving the WiFi on continues to burn through power even when you are not actively connected to a source. My advice turn off the radio until you are in a location that has a fast WiFi connection and plan to use it for a bit. Otherwise you are writing a tiny power check every few minutes, and cashing them out hits your battery fairly hard. To adjust, go to settings/Wi-Fi and select off.
4. Turn on Auto-Lock for the screen. The iPhone has a beautiful screen, but if you don't have Auto-Lock on it will be happy to keep that screen shining brightly until you manually turn it off. Not only is this not battery friendly, but it could lead to unexpected calls to Timbuktu thanks to a little accidental screen contact. You can adjust how long the phone will wait before Auto-locking, but the shorter the duration the greater the battery savings (and potentially the more secure the iPhone is, especially if you select an easy to remember but quick to type passcode while you are at it). To adjust this, go to settings/general and select a value for Auto-Lock.
5. Turn off the Equalizer. If you listen to music a lot, this one may be helpful. By turning off the equalizer you can save power over the entire listening session, and depending on the type of music you listen to this could be beneficial over time Apple has suggested this for the iPod for some time now. To adjust this, go to settings/iPod and turn off the EQ.
6. Pack more juice. Just because you are on the road does not mean that you can't have a backup power source for your iPhone. Several third party solutions are available that give you an easily pocketable power up to keep you running. For example, the 3GJuice gives you an additional 1800 mAh battery that will charge up your phone to 100% in relatively short time.
7. Take advantage of the commute time. Keep a mobile charger in the car, and plug up the phone when out for lunch or getting to a meeting location. Make it very convenient, and the action soon becomes habit, giving you a battery boost when you get to your destination. The same thing goes for keeping an extra USB cable handy when you are working most devices now have USB ports, and installing iTunes is not required to charge the iPhone from a port.
8. Kill the vibrate. A vibration alert requires a physical process to drive it, and as you would expect this takes a chunk of power to make it happen. You can save some power by being judicious with its use. You can find this (strangely enough) at settings/sound.
9. Turn off Bluetooth. Let's be honest, Bluetooth is great when it is in use. Wireless headsets are sweet, no doubt about it. But that connection requires an active radio to be on and listening for the headset to connect in and that requires power. By turning off the Bluetooth radio when not in use for extended periods of time you can save a little juice. This can be found at settings/general/bluetooth.
10. Update the phone often. Apple engineers are always working hard to tweak their flagship product to provide the best user experience, and these tweaks come to us through updates via iTunes. (For example, the latest 3.x update is already in beta and expected out soon.) So, if you typically do not sync via a desktop iTunes make it a point to do it on occasion and check for a new iPhone update you may save power by doing so.
Cell Phone Batteries on sale at OEM cellphone batteries
