The Power Struggle
Posted on 03. Mar, 2012 by naeem 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:
- Push is the fastest – email is checked constantly – several times a second automatically and obviously takes the most power as CPU is active
- 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
- 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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