How to fix battery life problems with iOS 5 or iPhone 4S
10:11:00 AM
First: Assess your usage!
Okay, this sounds
funny, but make sure you’re not just using your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch more
than you used to. Any time we get a new version of iOS, or a new device our
tendency is to never put it down. Now, with location based Reminders, Siri,
and other power hungry features, we might simply be using our device more than
we have in a while.
Before you do any
drastic battery life fixes, put your device down and see how fast the battery really is
draining.
Fixing Battery Life
If, in general,
your battery life is consistently short and you’re basically just watching the
indicator drain down before your eyes, here are some things to try, in order of
how easy they are to do.
- Restart/reset
your device.
If you haven’t rebooted in a while, give it a try. There could be a rogue
process or something else doing what it shouldn’t be doing, and a restart
can often fix that. (Here’s how to
reboot)
- Power
cycle.
About once a month, and certainly if you’re having problems, you should
completely drain your iPhone or iPad’s battery — drain it until it shuts
down on its own — and then charge it back up to full.
- Restore
your device as new. The single biggest cause
of battery life problems with iOS 5 occurs when they are restored from
backup and not set up as new devices. Whether it’s cruft or
corruption, a clean install as a new device — incredible pain in the butt
though it may be — is usually the best fix for any battery life issues.
This is the nuclear option. You will have to set up absolutely everything
again, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, but in most
cases your battery life will be better than ever.
- Go
to the Apple Store. Sometimes you do get a
lemon, or your iPhone or iPad develops a real problem that only Apple can
solve by either swapping it for another device or otherwise figuring out a
fix.
Saving battery life
Anything running
on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad uses up the battery, so we’re going to go
into the Settings app and turn some things down, and turn others off
altogether. The more you turn off, the longer your batter will last — but of
course the less you’ll be able to do. It’s a balancing act but one that can
help you squeeze out a little extra juice when you really need it.
- Turn
off Siri’s Raise to Speak. Go to Settings, General,
Siri. Readers keep telling us this has helped them with battery life due
to accelerometer issues.
- Turn
of Ping.
Go to Settings, General, Restrictions, (Enable Restrictions). Again,
readers say this prevents undue push. And who uses Ping anyway?
- Turn
off Location Services. Go to Settings, Location
Services, and turn off any app you really don’t need tracking or using
your location. You can also turn off system settings, and location based
time seems popular with our readers as a battery suck.
- Turn
off Push Notifications. Likewise, go to
Settings, Notifications, and turn off any app you don’t care to be alerted
about.
- Turn
of Notification Center widgets. Stocks, and particularly
weather in Notification Center seem to be causing our readers some battery
grief. Since weather can be location-based now, the potential is there for
more battery abuse.
- Kill
power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to
activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter
“jiggly” mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background,
especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or
navigation (like TomTom).)
Here are some old
standbys as well:
- Set
Auto-Lock to 1 minute
- Turn
off any extra sounds, like keyboard clicks
- Turn
off the iPod EQ
- Use
headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music
- Turn
down the screen brightness
- Turn
off Bluetooth when not using it
- Turn
off Wi-Fi when not using it
- Turn
off 3G when not using it (Not possible on iPhone 4S)
- Set
all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to “Fetch” (turn off Push)
Bonus tip: If you’re
really desperate, put your iPhone in Airplane Mode and save
the radios for when you need them. If you’re really desperate, you can also turn your
iPhone completely off until you need it (it will still use a tiny amount of
power but far, far less than anything else).
Plug in your device
Like our friend
Phil Nickinson from Android Central always says, don’t be ashamed to plug
in your device. If you’re using your iPhone or iPad a lot, plug it in to
recharge whenever you can. At home, at work, in the car, there are plenty of
opportunities to top up your battery.
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