Our top tips to ensure you’re never short of juice before the day’s out.
Since Apple rolled out iOS 6, there have been many complaints about poor battery life. It is true that your battery does appear to drain faster than before – we went out with a fully charged iPhone and spent time making calls, checking train times and managing emails. It was down to 10 per cent within four hours.
Of course, we can also go a day or two without needing to charge, so the science isn’t perfect. What we do know is that you can help things along by ensuring that services you don’t need are turned off, that you don’t have apps running needlessly and that the number of tasks the iPhone needs to perform are kept to a minimum.
Here we look at ten things that you can do to help maximise your battery life without hampering your enjoyment of the device. After all, the most effective way would be to not use it at all, but that would be silly, wouldn’t it?
1. Location Services The GPS function built into the iPhone lets apps pinpoint exactly where you are so that you can take advantage of functions, from discovering what is around you to finding your way on a map. You don’t always need it though. Go to Settings>Privacy>Location Services and turn it off whenever you can.
2. Do you need 3G? While 3G – and 4G come to think of it – is brilliant for those times when you are not in a Wi-Fi hotspot, you don’t always need it turned on. You can restrict your data to ‘Wi-Fi only’ by going to Settings>General>Cellular and turning Cellular Data to the Off position. This will stop any battery loss, albeit a small one.
3. Adjust brightness Your iPhone is able to detect the ambient light wherever you are. When there is a lot of ambient light, the screen becomes brighter and vice versa. You can enable Auto-Brightness by going to Settings>Brightness & Wallpaper and turning Auto- Brightness on. You can also manually dim the screen to save power too.
4. Don’t push data Imagine you had a device that was constantly waiting for input and then, when it found what it liked, shouted about it to you. That’s what happens when you have data pushed to your phone to alert you of new notifications. Turn it off by going to Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>Fetch New Data.
5. Turn Bluetooth off When you have Bluetooth enabled, it will constantly accept incoming data even when you do not want it. That is because the iPhone is set up to monitor any Bluetooth signals and this will drain your battery. So when you do not need Bluetooth, turn it off by going to Settings>Bluetooth.
6. Turn off Wi-Fi Most of us are guilty of leaving our Wi-Fi monitor turned on so that it will switch to a faster method of data connection whenever you are within range. Leaving it in this state when you are nowhere near a hotspot needlessly drains the battery. Go to Settings>Wi-Fi and slide to turn this function off until you next need it.
7. More hidden secrets You have to delve a little deeper here because it’s not immediately obvious what you should tap, but go to Location Services and then System Services and you can turn off elements such as Genius for Apps, Location Based iAds and Call Network Search, all of which can help to free up battery resources.
8. Email preferences Email can be checked by having the phone monitor for new messages. Rather than shutting this function down altogether as in Tip 4, you can limit the number of times the phone checks for emails by going to Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>Fetch New Data and selecting Every 30 minutes or Hourly.
9. Stop background apps It’s easy to tap icons and forget just how many apps you have open. Before you know it, you have numerous apps in the background all working their magic but draining your battery power too. Keep a mental note to close background apps. Double-tap Home, press and hold an app and tap ‘-’ to close it.
10. Sleepy time When your iPhone is active, it will drain the battery far faster than when it is snoozing peacefully until you wake it. More commonly referred to as Auto-Lock, the aim is to lock it out and send it to sleep in the shortest convenient time for you. Aim for around two minutes. Go to Settings>General>Auto-Lock.