How I Get 8.25 Hours Of Usage On 1 Charge With 16.75 Hours Standby!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (davidbadash) know that I’ve been in love with my iPhone for months, but always seem to have a problem with it. The latest problem has been its poor battery life. I’m on my second iPhone - the first had several problems, including dropping the connection for 13 hours! But the one good thing with my original iPhone was its battery life. Seven hours of usage in a 24 hour period was average. So, when I got the new iPhone (thank you, Apple Genius) the first thing I realized was that its battery life was averaging about four hours of usage - five at the most. Big difference!

Apple claims the following on their web site:
Talk time: Up to 8 hours
Standby time: Up to 250 hours
Internet use: Up to 6 hours
Video playback: Up to 7 hours
Audio playback: Up to 24 hours

So, I went back to the Apple store, the one in Manhattan on 14th Street (the best of the three in Manhattan, by the way.) I explained the issue, and the Apple Genius told me this, which I immediately posted on Twitter in my usual congenial, 140 character prose:

Apple store: “If you turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, lower screen brightness, turn off mail checking, then battery life should be no problem.”

and then

Really? Thanks, Apple Geniuses! Big help. If I don’t use my iPhone, battery life would be no problem, either.

A product should work the way you want it to. You shouldn’t have to change your work mode to suit your tools - tools should conform to your needs, not the other way around. But, that said, you make choices. The iPhone is the best of breed, if not the only one in its breed. So, I rethought the Genius’ suggestion. and here’s how i get over eight hour of usage a day on my iPhone.

Go to “Settings” and make the following adjustments:

1. Switch Wi-Fi to “Off.” Yeah, I freaked at the idea of that, too. But Wi-Fi, it turns out, is constantly in search mode, and drains your battery very quickly. If you use Safari on your iPhone alot, and feel the performance is significantly worse, you can always (and easily) toggle Wi-Fi back to “On” when you know you’ll be needing it. You can still roam the Internet on the Edge network, which will automatically turn on when Wi-Fi is off.

2. Under “Brightness,” move the slider bar as much to the left (low) as you can while still being able to see what’s on your screen. Then make sure “Auto-Brightness” is “On.” Feedback I’ve gotten from several folks tell me this alone has added a great deal of battery life to their iPhone.

3. Move to “General”, and turn Bluetooth to “Off.” Apple has essentially disabled much of Bluetooth’s functionality anyway. One of my all-time favorite apps, BluePhone Elite, is no longer of use to me. This app would start or stop iTunes when my iPhone rang, would allow me to send text messages through my cell phone, but via my MacBook Pro’s keyboard, and would greet me and turn on iTunes when I walked into the room. All that is gone, thanks to Apple’s ridiculous, micro-managing of Bluetooth on the iPhone. So, turn off Bluetooth.

4. Turn Auto-Check to “Manual” in the Mail section. If you really need to know when you get a new email, increase the amount of time mail will check for new mail. If you can get by with mail checking once an hour, go for it. Personally, if I’m not by my laptop, I’ll check my email anyway, so i don’t really need Mail to auto-check. When you go in to the Mail app on the iPhone, you can see it checks for new mail then, so why have it check every 15 minutes? It’s a luxury you can do without.

So, those four adjustments more than doubled my battery life. By the way, I’ve learned that you should turn off your iPhone regularly, or at least re-boot it every day or two. You should also make sure you charge it in the cradle instead of charging it from your computer when possible. I reboot the phone every evening now, then put it in the cradle and let it charge overnight. Then, every morning, I check the usage stats under settings to make sure usage and standby are at “zero” so I can properly gauge its battery life.

Hopefully you’ll get more usage out of your iPhone. It really is an amazing product, and I would be lost without mine.

Lastly, I should probably mention that i am a small shareholder of Apple stock. And I do hope you’ll follow me on Twitter!

Tags: Apple, Battery, BluePhoneElite, iPhone