The Power Struggle

Posted on 03. Mar, 2012 by in Blog

There are a lot of things that I love about my iPhone 4S – but one thing that I really would love to see change is the battery life. Despite a brand new phone, these days,  I barely get through a whole day before I need to hook it up to the charger.  I am determined to understand the issue or swap the phone. But one hour at the Apple store with a “genius” is all it took to solve this problem.

1)      Biggest culprit: location services.  Of course you need the location service turned on for Siri, maps etc. But I was shocked to see that I had 30+ applications with location turned on.  Some of these apps I had used over a year ago and only once.   If you want to turn off all of the applications that use location services, here is the path:  Settings à Location Services – action: turn off.  I now only have location services activated for the ones that I really mean to use – just Siri and Maps.

2)      Bluetooth is the next offender  for battery life consumption.  I do use Bluetooth to link with my Blue Ant hands free in the car, but I don’t always have a need for Bluetooth (for example when I am travelling). So I turned this off:  Settings à General à Bluetooth .

3)      Getting your emails: there are 3 ways that iPhone receives your emails. Push, Fetch and Manual. Here is the difference:

  1. Push is the fastest – email is checked constantly – several times a second automatically and obviously takes the most power as CPU is active
  2. Fetch is when iPhone seeks and checks at an interval chosen by you if any new email has arrived at the server and then downloads it.  You can chose a setting to fetch every 15 minute, 30 or 60 minutes
  3. Manual is when the iPhone checks the email server for a new email only when you tell it to or when you open the email client by tapping it

So my iPhone was set to get emails from my 9 or so email accounts almost all using the PUSH setting – oh boy! This must be draining.  Obviously from the power consumption point of view you would want all of these email accounts to be Manual but we need speed.  So what I did was to set my work email to PUSH and all others to MANUAL.  So when I get a work email (or whichever one is most important to you) and you will open the email client when you hear the beep.  All other accounts will be checked ‘manually’ and I will see all of the new emails at once. Path:  Settings à Mail, Contacts, Calendar à Fetch New Data à Advanced

Well I have to report that modifying these 3 issues did fix my battery drainage problem.  I can now end the day with heavy use and still have ~15% left by midnight.

Now I must work on improving my relationship with Siri.

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