10 Ways to Increase your Battery Life

April 16, 08 by Doug

My biggest complaint about the iPhone and iPod Touch is the battery life. During heavy usage you can’t even get a full 3 hours out of it. The best thing you can do is know what to look out for. . .and hopefully this list will help.

10) Keep It On

There really isn’t any reason turn it off at the end of the day. As long as it is in ’sleep mode’(without playing music) it turns all network activity off. The device actually uses a lot of the batter just to turn it on. . .even more than if you had just left it on.

9) Turn Sound Effects Off

You can go into Settings -> General -> Sound Effects and turn it off. Or at least set it to either Speaker or Headphones. . .not Both(which it is by default).

8) Turn EQ Off

You can go into Settings -> Music -> EQ and turn it off. This will use less resources to monitor the EQ.

7) Less Email Addresses

You can go into Settings -> Mail and disable a few of your email accounts. The less email addresses your iPhone or iPod Touch has to check, the more battery life you will have. This is because of network activity usage.

7a) Check Email Less Often

You can go into Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check and set this to manual. . .or at least Every hour(as opposed to 15/30 minutes). Just like above, the your device has to connect to Wifi/Edge the longer your battery will last.

6) Set Auto-Lock

You can go into Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock and set it to 1-3 minutes(I have mine set to 1). The longer your screen is turned on the more it uses the battery. Either do this or get used to putting it into ’sleep mode’ immediately after usage.

5) Turn BlueTooth Off

You can either do this via Settings or in the BossPrefs application.

4) Keep Brightness Dim

You can go into Settings -> Brightness and move the bar on the top toward the left. Go as far to the left as you can(without sacrificing quality). The less bright the screen has to be the longer your battery will last.

4a) Turn Auto-Brightness Off

You can go into Settings -> Brightness and turn Auto-Brightness off. This will not only prevent the device from increasing the brightness level. It will also use less resources. . .since it doesn’t have to monitor anything.

3) Turn Edge Off

Much like BlueTooth, you can do this from either Settings or the 3rd party application BossPrefs.

2) Turn SSH Off

You can go into the application BossPrefs, Services, or the default SSH icon and turn this service on/off. This runs in the background when any network activity is available. This is one of the biggest reasons people who Jailbreak their iPhones and iPod Touches have very poor battery life.

1) Turn WiFi Off

Even more than SSH, WiFi really uses your battery. Paired with MobileSafari browsing, your battery will not even last 3 hours. I normally just put the device into sleep mode, and it turns of WiFi automatically. But, when music is playing WiFi is on, and it will deplete your battery with the quickness.

This is a lot of things to monitor. . .but if you get into the habit of turning services on/off(much like turning off a light when you leave the room). . .you could go an extra 2-3 days between charging sessions.

Bonus
At least once per month try and use all of the battery life in your iPhone and iPod Touch. The lower you get the battery level the better. Then recharge your device to 100%. This will ‘reset’ your battery to the best of it’s ability. The more you recharge your device, without letting the battery die completely, the lower your ‘battery capacity’ is. Doing this once per month(or even once per week) will keep your battery in tip top shape.

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19 Reviews for this post

  1. tobiasps Says: 16.04.08 at 6:41 am

    Hi Doug,
    About the battery recharging: It is true what you say about the battery needs to be fully discharged once in a while but to my knowlege this should be done about every 30 charges, that is about once a month (as you also say, but no every week).
    Lithium-ion batteries (the type used in mobilephones, computers and other similar devices), that is the chemistry, prefers partial discharge rather than fully discharge. The problem is the electronic controlling the charging, it slowly gets out of sync with the actual charge level of the battery when doing partial discharges. This can led to ‘overcharging’ the battery, which will damage the battery.
    Therefore to get the battery back in sync you must do a full discharge and a full recharge of the battery. But this should only be done every 30 charge.

    In short:
    - Keep your battery charged, that is charge it whenever you can.
    - Every 30 charge do a full discharge and a full recharge

    Reference: http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

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  2. Doug Says: 16.04.08 at 1:04 pm

    Thanks for that tip Tobia

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  3. mightyneek Says: 17.04.08 at 11:40 am

    Great Tips!

    Thanks.

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  4. Joey Says: 26.04.08 at 1:59 am

    Yes, I got rid of OpenSSH because I don;t SSH into my phone anymore and it saves a bunch of battery life! Thanks!

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  5. jesus Says: 06.08.08 at 7:59 am

    Why did you get one in the first place if you have to turn off all functions and stuff.

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  6. Corim123 Says: 28.08.08 at 5:25 pm

    Yea that SSH comment is bull$h!t. SSH only actually runs when there is an active connection to it and the usage is minimal. Really it doesn’t do jack$h!t. It might seem like you get more time, but that is just your perception of it. Google it and stop spreading incorrect facts. I mean unless you know EXACTLY how SSH and UNIX works and can prove me wrong……

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  7. Doug Says: 29.08.08 at 2:21 am

    @Corim, actuah OpenSSH constantly runs in the background. . ./waiting/ for a connection. If it isn’t running, it can’t detect the connection.

    I used to do some admin work for 64+TB of storage(and 100+ front ends) via the command line. I think I know what I’m talking about.

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  8. tttiger Says: 23.10.08 at 5:17 am

    Sorry DOUG but you are wrong on this one, the sshd process only starts up once someone trys to connect to the iphone via SSH (check it out yourself by running the “ps” command, each new session is a different instance of sshd). It’s simply added to the list of connections in the inetd deamon which is always running on the iphone anyway.

    Source:
    http://blog.psmxy.org/pkg-info/openssh/

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  9. Steven Says: 14.11.08 at 11:30 pm

    How, do you issue the ps command, do you just type “ps” in terminal once your are connect to the iphone or ipod touch?

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  10. Saifudeen Says: 12.01.09 at 9:45 am

    Why should I use iPhone if I will have to turn everything OFF ?

    :)

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  11. lol Says: 25.02.09 at 5:51 pm

    lol comment above

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  12. Sueper Says: 20.03.09 at 1:45 pm

    My son uses his iphone to stream music all day at work checks his email regularly watches youtube vids, the lot and only needs to charge it every other day. Does he have a super iphone or are everyone elses batteries borked?

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  13. rccar Says: 10.04.09 at 9:49 pm

    I use my iphone non-stop, charge it every night. makes it from 7-10 with about 20% left, i know all the crap there is to know about li-on batterys i have a li-po in my rc car. you never want to over discharge them, that kills them. cycling them every 30 days is a great idea.
    These batterys are 1 cell, my li-po is 2 cells so I have to balance them to make sure they are at the same voltage each. this requires a special “li-po balance charger” over-discharging the battery is probbally the worst thing to do to them, although the iPhone has a cut-off built into it. my speed control for the rc car also has that, its called li-po cutoff circuitry.

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  14. Emily Says: 23.04.09 at 11:05 pm

    So I should charge my iTouch when it gets to about 10% of my battery remaining?

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  15. Gostixel Says: 16.05.09 at 6:13 am

    Хм,согласен с предыдущими ораторами
    ^..^ Bye

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  16. ShuntiBoo Says: 30.05.09 at 12:11 am

    I only get about 2-3 hours on mi iPod touch. It might be sumthin wrong wit some of the batteries but not all of them. IDK?¿?¿?¿

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  17. KeriBaby Says: 30.05.09 at 11:18 am

    ShuntiBoo u might be right

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  18. adey Says: 20.06.09 at 7:19 pm

    i barely get 5 hours on standby from my iphone on the standard 3.0 firmware – though I get 35 hrs with medium use with the Dev Team jailbreak – so its definitely the software not the hardware. using SBSettings to flick on wi-fi and EDGE when you need it helps, as does no push/manual on email. i recommend getting pwnagetool 3.0 to see how your battery improves

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  19. Elliot Says: 11.10.09 at 1:19 pm

    In summary, don’t use your phone at all..

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