Extend your iPhone 3G’s battery life
Posted by Will on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm under Announcements, Apple, Mac OS, iPhone
With the new GPS receiver and 3G radio sucking the life out of your iPhone 3G’s battery like there’s no tomorrow, you’ll likely have noticed shorter battery life compared with the first-generation iPhone. If the iPhone 3G is your first foray in to the world of Apple phoning, then just accept that whatever battery life you manage to get is normal.
But, just because you have faster data speeds (enabling faster web-surfing) and real-deal GPS hardware tucked inside that glossy-backed iPhone 3G of yours, doesn’t mean you have to live with shortened battery uptime. There are a few things you can do to try and increase the time between battery charges.
You can disable your 3G data radio. That means you get slower web-surfing and data-speeds. You’ll be limited to EDGE data access. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean your web-surfing times will suffer all that much. iPhone 2.0 OS boasts improved Webkit performance that helps load websites faster than with previous versions of the iPhone Mac OS. You’ll be surfing at slower speeds than if you had the 3G radio enabled, but you’ll still be surfing at faster speeds than the original iPhone running iPhone 1.1.4 OS.
- Navigate to Settings>General>Network>Enable 3G and toggle “OFF’
You can try to force-quit iPhone applications that may be running in the background and sucking precious electrons from your battery pack. Once started, most iPhone applications will continue to persist in an inactive state in the background. They wait for you to return to them, starting up lickity-quick in the same state that you left it in. Note: I should clarify that only Apple’s own default iPhone applications (the applications that came out-of-the-box with your iPhone) run in the background. And, with the iPhone 3G jailbreak now live, jailbreak applications can run in the background as well. Use this method for official iPhone applications and jailbreak applications.
- Open up suspect applications (anything that you don’t want persisting in the background) and hold down the “Home” (the only button on the iPhone’s face) until the application quits. It takes a while, be patient.
Try resetting the iPhone. As with any computer, a quick system restart can solve most problems faster and easier than tracking down the specific issue.
- Hold down the Power/Sleep button located along the top-edge of the iPhone until you see the “Slide to Power OFF” prompt.
- Flick the slider to the right and let the iPhone shutdown.
- Press the Power button to turn on the iPhone
Turn off your iPhone 3G or iPhone’s WiFi radio. If you have the iPhone 3G, you’re not hurting for super-fast data speeds anyway. If you have an iPhone with iPhone 2.0 OS, you’ll notice faster web-surfing on EDGE as well. WiFi can suck battery life like nothing else. Try disabling this to get more uptime from your iPhone batter.
- Navigate to Settings>WiFi and toggle to “OFF”
Change your fetch data settings. Your iPhone can automatically check various email accounts at preset intervals. Depending on the interval and how many emails accounts you have setup on your iPhone, checking mail can drain your battery faster than you’d like. Try turning off automatic email fetching (if email isn’t that important to you) or increasing the fetch-interval.
- Navigate to Settings>Fetch New Data and set your interval to “30 Minutes,” “1 Hour,” Or Manual
- Setting the “Fetch New Data” option to “Manual” will require you to update your iPhone Email client in order to receive new emails.
Turn off location-services. As cool as it is to see yourself located on Google Maps and have photos geo-tagged with your location, it can be a tax on your battery to constantly update your iPhone’s position. Try turning off the Location Services option.
- Navigate to Settings>General and toggle “Location Services” to “OFF”
Lastly, you can try to reset your network settings. This can also resolve any signal strength issues, but will also wipe any stored WiFi passwords and settings. Use this as a last resort - not because its dangerous, but because it can be a hassle to re-enter all your WiFi passwords.
- Navigate to Settings>General>Reset and hit “Reset Network Settings”
Good luck, and don’t forget to leave a comment down below!
Update
The list has been updated.
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 pm
there is an easier way to reset the the iPhone than your suggested method. Hold the home button and the sleep button at the same time. When the power off switch appears on the screen ignore it. Keep holding the home and sleep buttons for another few seconds. The iPhone will then reset without having to actually power off.
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:31 am
A generic way to save more battery power: turn all radios in the device off
3G-off, WiFi-off, BT-off, GPS-off.
In fact, put it in flight mode, that’s 2G off too.
You won’t have much functionality but the battery should last forever
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:48 am
to be quite honest you just need to turn off the wifi alone to see a big boost in the battery life and no telling the device to not alert you of wifi networks is not the same as disabling the wifi. Even in that state it still drains a lot of battery life,turn it off completely and you should see very good improvement.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 am
I’m an iPhone developer and I noticed that you have stated something totally incorrect in step number 2. Applications do not run in the background on the iPhone. The only parallel processes on the iPhone are low level kernel daemons and the actually phone application–everything else runs in serial.
When you press the home button the application state is serialized into a file in the application’s directory, and all the resources held by the application are released. When you return to the application, the application state is deserialized from the serialized file (or not–depending on how the developer implemented their app). So there is no such thing as a force quit on the iPhone, and that will do nothing to effect the battery life
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Going along with what Andre said, I actually don’t think that your suggestion of turning of “ask to join networks” really makes a substantive difference. Either way, if WiFi is enabled, then your phone still needs to be just as frequently scanning available networks.
Better to just turn off the wifi entirely and only enable it when you’re in a network you want to use (or in a place where you want to search for networks).
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I like Ben’s idea, how do I turn off GPS?
What I’d really like is to turn off all but WiFi. I only need phone, gps, and edge/3g when traveling.
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Another thing to be very careful with is to turn Push e-mail off, I am still on 1st Gen - but that was a big thing for me when I got the phone last year. Your e-mail will load when you select the e-mail icon - there’s no reason to have it any other way - especially if your battery is draining!!
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
When I turned off Push and told it to fetch my email every 15 minutes my battery life tripled! That is with GPS and WiFi off of course (I left 3G on).
July 23rd, 2008 at 4:27 pm
In addition to many of the valid options, simply adjusting your brightness to be a bit dimmer, turning off your sounds and not using vibrate when you don’t need the alerts, turning off bluetooth (again when not using it), turning off the time feature for automatically setting the date & time, setting your auto-lock to 1 minute can all make an impact to increase your iPhone’s battery life. Frankly, setting my brightness to almost all the way down, auto-locking after a minute and making data fetched manually proved to be the most beneficial.
July 23rd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I would really like to see an application made one for wifi on/off one for 3G on/off
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Right there with you goober…
I want a developer to make a simple app that is:
3G toggle
WiFi toggle
Bluetooth Toggle
These things can be up to 7 or more keystrokes to get to, having a little toggle on the homescreen would be perfect.
I tried creating this in the SDK but I’m no developer - so I could make the buttons, icons, and application flow, I just couldn’t get it “to work”.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I’m right there with you guys.
In fact, there was just such an application written for jailbroken iPhones. I would imagine a simple (for the developer, it would be impossible for me to do) update to the code and a port to iPhone 2.0 OS would bring those features to the iPhone 3G. I liked being able to disable or enable my WiFi, Bluetooth on a whim, without having to go through multiple menus.
It’s not a vital application, but it sure would be handy
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
If you are actively using data you get better battery life with wifi then both 3g and edge. When the phone locks, it also breaks the wifi connection, so if you’re at home it’s almost always a safe bet to turn off 3g and turn on wifi to keep those fast speeds but save battery.
Also, you can turn off everything but wifi by turning airplane mode on then going to wifi and turning that on, which is new for firmware 2.0
July 24th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Is anyone else able to validate Hassan’s comment that “Applications do not run in the background on the iPhone”?
Next to WiFi power issues, I think it’s a pretty important thing to know about, and if it’s true, then the leading article is putting us wrong and I am wasting my time with this imaginary “forced quit” process.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:29 am
They updated the article to recognize his comment, which you would have noticed if you had bothered to read it, you great, ocean-going, pillock
July 24th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Pat, you’re a jerk. I read the article but it wasn’t clear to me how Hassans comments related the article (including the extra note), that’s why I asked for validation.
Excuse us for asking.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Oy, I’m a jerk? How about you give me a jerk ginger beer
July 24th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Applications do not run in the background on the iPhone”?
How can apps run in background when iphone dont even have multitasking?
July 24th, 2008 at 9:25 am
What’s a “Pillock?”
July 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Take a look at the iPhone keynote that Steve Jobs gave for the WWDC ‘08 back in june for more rationale behind why the iPhone does not allow applications to run in the background (it’s about halfway into the keynote). The short of it is, that apple wants to give the iphone better performance for the application that is currently running by not siphoning off CPU cycles to background processes.
http://apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc08/
July 24th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I’ve noticed switching on the airline option does the trick as far as saving power. You basically turn it into an iPod Touch for using apps like games.
I’ve written up my own list of tips as well:
http://onxo.blogspot.com/2008/07/mobile-tips-to-extend-battery-life.html
July 24th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Basically what i think all of us blokes (and shelias) are looking for is similar to the Blackberry’s “profiles” function. It would be nice to have several for different scenarios. i travel a bit and having one for when i am in a complete wi-fi area vs. one for 3G and one for “best battery life” would be keen.
Any iPhone dev’ers on this?? If so, make it… make it free to allow one profile and make a second one for .99 that allows unlimited profiles.
damn i am good
July 24th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Damn fine idea, Bryan. I’d like to see something like that myself. I’d happily pay a buck for that.
Oh, and don’t forget to Digg it UP, people!
(Hit the Digg button at the bottom of the post)
July 24th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
if you’r still out of 3G juice: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/07/18/several-backup-batteries-can-extend-your-daily-iphone-3g-use
July 29th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Why don’t you just use a spare battery? Oh, wait…nevermind.
August 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Here is was REALLY helped my iPhone 3G battery… A LOT! AND I even KEEP 3G ENABLED!
1) Turn push mail off. Set mail to fetch at 1 hour intervals.
2) Turn WiFi off when not needed.
3) Turn Bluetooth off when not needed.
4) AND… This one is VITALLY IMPORTANT: when you find yourself using GPS, you MUST go into settings and turn Location Services OFF AGAIN! This is a major bug and hopefully Apple fixes it soon. This 4th step is the one that saved me. It meant the different between having my battery drained before lunch - to having it at at about 90% capacity at bedtime!
August 21st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Apple really should have made that side “quiet” switch… user programmable.
We could then go to a new “Settings->Side Switch” and decide for ourselves what we would like that switch do to:
GPS on/off
EDGE on/off
3G on/off
BlueTooth on/off
Ringer on/off
Vibrate on/off
Auto-lock on/off
Wi-Fi on/off
Saving battery-life!
Mine would be configured to:
“Everything off”… but “Wi-FI on”.
(Many airlines are now allowing wi-fi… but you must
turn everything else off.)
… all by instantly, throwing 1 (configured) switch.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
> 4) AND… This one is VITALLY IMPORTANT: when you find
> yourself using GPS, you MUST go into settings and
> turn Location Services OFF AGAIN! This is a major bug
>
> …to having it at at about 90% capacity at bedtime!
Really? That’s a HUGE battery savings.
But if I *AM* using GPS… why would I want to turn “location services” off (twice? or even once?)
Doesn’t GPS *NEED* “location services”?
September 17th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Thats right location services needs to be on in order for the GPS to work.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Thanks for the info. It was a big help to me.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
hello ther iphone3G users!!!!!!da 1s wit da battery issues..
count me in!!!
same issues..hd 2.0 firmware..battery lasted 3hrs on standby..now on da 2.1 version..improved 2 6hrs..standby..wit all functions like 3G,,wifi switched off..believe me..ive switched everythin off..so its jus a plain ****** normal phone wit no battery capacity(id get a better chinese copy of da iphone wit better capacity and functions..no offence 2 any nationalities!!!)..sorry 4 da foul lang..but im really cheezed off!!!
i wanna try da calender sync method..can someone help me wit tht cos i dont seem 2 find tht option in da settings!!how do i change my calender sync setting???
my iphone also kinda heats up like some of u guys!!and my usage counter exaggerates my actual usage,,like say if i used da phone 4 a 5min call..it shows more thn 1 hour of usage..wierd phone!!!
also could any of u advice me if i was to reset network settings..wii my phone get bricked,,as i hv unlocked using turbosim!!
cheers frm dubai,uae