Extend your iPhone 3G’s battery life
By Will Park on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 PM PST In Announcements, Apple, iPhone, iPhone OS
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 (NSDQ: AAPL) 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 (NSDQ: GOOG) 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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.
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!!
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).
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.
I would really like to see an application made one for wifi on/off one for 3G on/off
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”.
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
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
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.
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
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.
Oy, I’m a jerk? How about you give me a jerk ginger beer
Applications do not run in the background on the iPhone”?
How can apps run in background when iphone dont even have multitasking?
What’s a “Pillock?”
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/
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
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
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)
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
Why don’t you just use a spare battery? Oh, wait…nevermind.
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!
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.
> 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”?
Thats right location services needs to be on in order for the GPS to work.
Thanks for the info. It was a big help to me.
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
hi guys!!!
mine has improved quite a bit in da last few days..follow da instructions 1.RESET NETWORK SETTINGS 2.SWITCH OFF ALL APPLICATIONS LIKE GPS,3G,WIFI,AUTOMATIC TIME UPDATE AND PUSH UNLESS U REQUIRE!!(SAD THOUGH!!) 3.FORCE QUIT EACH ICON INDIVIDUALLU AFTER OPENING DA ICON 4.BRIGHTNESS AT NEXT TO LOW(SWITCH OFF AUTO BRIGHT)
mine has gone 3hrs standby to 16hrs standby wit minimal usage..and 14hrs after moderate usage..its been increasing every other day..its spooky..its got a mind of its own..A.I kinda!!!
pleasr respond if my tips helped u out..cheers!!
frm abu dhabi(uae)
This is the worst article i have ever read, how is restarting your iPhone going to help the battery life, plus you say that applications run in the backround but everyone knows that one of the major drawbacks of iphone is it can’t run apps in the backround. Why would someone turn off 3G when they went out and bought an iPhone 3G, the battery life is amazing on the iPhone 3G and you just don’t take this in to account this article is fact-less worthless and pointless, it should never have been written.
Well some tips works for sure if not all.
My wife and I both have an iPhone 3G. She has all services enabled, and has her POP mail settings to “fetch” at 15 minute intervals. Her battery will last all day with juice to spare.
I have the same phone. Bought just days apart. Only difference is that mine is black and her’s is white.
My phone has all services enabled, but I’m using one thing she’s not….ActiveSync to connect to my corporate email server. I get upwards of 100 emails a day, and all those emails getting pushed to my phone constantly, all day long, has my battery down to less than 20% by 5pm (usually off the charger in the AM around 7:30). My battery can’t make it though a day without having a little booster charge in the car on the way home.
Because of this, I’m thinking push email is the culprit. If I were traveling, and needed to extend battery life, the mail push would be the first thing I’d turn off.
I used to have a Blackberry, and it operated on the EDGE network only. It did have WiFi capability, but I kept it turned off as it would do VoIP over the Wifi and if you walked out of range, you’d loose the call. Very slick feature if you don’t have cell service, but because of that I kept WiFi disabled. My Blackberry battery would drain fairly quickly too, but it would make it to bedtime (usually with only one bar left). The saving grace is that I could bring a spare battery or two if traveling. When the one in the phone died, I popped it out and put in a charged one. Sadly, you have to have an external battery for the iPhone to do anything like that. Apple dropped the ball by not having a removable battery, in my humble opinion.
I really don’t think you guys are getting it….
The way you use and charge your battery makes as much a difference as the apps draining it. If you charge a totally dead iphone, the battery will fill to 100% charge. If you plug in a partially dead iphone for a short amount of time, it will charge the “uncharged” part of the battery, and will cause damage to the rest. This damage builds up and makes your battery life worse and worse. Long story short, only charge your iphone(or any other device) when the battery is almost dead, and charge it until it is completely full, do not skip the trickle charge phase. If you take care of your battery, it will last MUCH longer. For the skeptics, I will explain the science as lay as I can. It’s really pretty long, but it’s worth reading.
The iPhone uses a Lithium ion battery. It’s a mixed salt battery using a trade secret formula. The advantage of a Li-ion battery as opposed to other rechargeables, like Ni(M)h, is that there is greatly decreased “cell memory.” Think of it like filling a glass with water. If you add 1 cup of water, or a full battery charge, then drink half of that, you now have a half cup. If you add 1/4 cup and drink another half cup, you now have 1/4 cup left. if you add 3/4 cup now, you have a full cup again. This is the ideal scenario, but this isn’t how it works. ALL batteries exhibit memory.
If you charge your phone overnight the first time you use it, you now have a full battery. You basically have a series of towers in your battery. These towers are covered in charged lithium ions. There is also a second set of towers that attract non charged lithium ions. When you apply power via the charger, you are increasing the charge on the ions and they jump from the towers of non charged ions to the towers of charged ions. Conversely, when you use the battery, you are decreasing the charge on the ions and they jump to towers of non charged ions.
Though the goal in a li-ion battery is to make towers that cannot react with the ions, this isn’t possible. When your phone has 20% charge, and you plug it in, a flood of electrons pours over the towers. unfortunately, some of the ions are already charged, and they take on an extra electron. This is a phenomenon that all Electrical Engineers struggle against. These now “over-charged” ions can react with each other to form diatoms, or react with the anode or cathode(the towers) and form completely inert solids. These ions will no longer charge. Now, if you lose 100 ions per charge, your battery will still be within a few percent of it’s original capacity in a year’s time, but if you lose 100,000 per charge, you are treading in dangerous water.
If you plug in your battery, and you have a less than 5 or 10% charge, there is a massive amount of ions that will readily take an electron and the number of already charged ions that will take another minuscule. Whereas if you have a 50% or 75% or 80% charge and you plug it in, there is a very good chance you will over charge a lot of ions.
The iphone has a system in it that evenly spreads the incoming electrons to the towers to make sure there are plenty of uncharged ions to accept charge, but the warmer your battery and environment are, the less effective this is. The battery will try to evenly strip the towers, so when your battery says “80%” charge, though 80% of the capacity has been filled, the battery will take on about double more electrons before all the negative ions will move over. This is why the phone then enters a trickle charge mode. When one electron enters the battery, it will almost never end up over charging an ion, it will be attracted to an uncharged ion and they will pair. Once the towers are fully charged, the ions will accept electrons and they will all move over and the towers themselves will hold a negative(more power) charge.
If you begin allowing your battery to die before recharging it, there is actually a chance that you can reverse some of the damage done. When the battery gets very near to dead, it might begin pulling electrons from the inert reacted ions and allow them to jump to a tower.
If you want your battery to last all day, or two days, or three days, train it to do so. Don’t let it charge for a little extra juice between long charges, don’t pull it at 50% charge, use it for an hour and plug it back in. If you have to unplug it early, let it die before you recharge it. If it is near dead and you have no other option, a few bad cycles won’t be the end of the world, but every time you plug it in when the battery isn’t very low you cause damage.
The article and comments are full of errors, the last one coming from Cole. The main attraction of Li-ion batteries (other than the increased capacity) is they do not suffer from memory effects. In fact, the best way to use a Li-ion battery is to keep it plugged in most of the time and discharge it about 20% once or twice during the day. Apple has articles on this very topic on their website for the Li-ion batteries in their laptops.
Regarding Wi-Fi and 3G, the 3G radio uses WAY more power than the Wi-Fi radio. The 3G one operates (I think) in the 1W range (to send a signal all the way to the radio tower) vs. the Wi-Fi which uses milliWatts and transmits 30 to 50 feet. You should turn off the setting about asking you to join networks because it’s annoying. But I don’t think the phone will ask about networks unless there is an app that is hoping to perform an update at that time. More on that below.
Meanwhile, the GPS is not operating unless you have an application running that is requesting location services from the GPS. Therefore, turning off location services doesn’t help you at all. The one area this might help is if you are running the maps app (for example) and you let the screen timeout/lock on its own. In that situation I am not clear on whether the maps app is still running or whether it’s sleeping. So I always quit the maps app when I am done with it for a while, since it and others all start up very quickly. But personally I think the app is asleep and so is the GPS radio …
Regarding force-quitting applications, that definitely does exist in the iPhone, it’s right there in the manual for crying out loud! You force quit an application if it’s hung, wedged, stuck, non-responsive. That’s rare but it does happen, and the way you deal with it is by holding down the Home button for 10 seconds or 15 or whatever it is, and then the app goes away and you end up back in the home screen. What “force quit” does to a normally responding application I do not know, except that it definitely does force quit it too. The question is, When you start it back up does it just restore itself to the same state using some save/restore mechanism? I have had the maps app in a weird state on more than one occasion where quitting and force quitting had no effect, and a reboot of the entire phone was required.
Finally, the two most effective ways to preserve battery life without disabling everything that’s good on the phone, is to reduce the number of checks for email (so turn off Push and set your Mail update to 1 hour or manual) and turn down the screen brightness. When you turn on your phone (wake it up from sleep, that is) and enter the mail app, it checks for mail then, regardless of your update frequency. The guy running active sync might be able to run active sync without having pushed turned on. There is no reason for your phone to be getting updates immediately, unless you are relying on those updates in a timely fashion. I bet you can just set it to manual or every hour and still have all the other features of active sync.
Taking pictures and running the maps application for an extended period are very costly to the battery life. If you use your phone as a GPS in the car you need to plug it in. If you constantly drain your phone and recharge it you will need a new battery sooner rather than later, because each discharge/recharge is called a charge cycle and the battery only has so many of those before it starts to lose its ability to hold a charge.
Don’t cripple your phone!
While it will save a significant amount of battery life, your web speeds will suffer significantly in all cases if you turn off 3G data radio and aren’t using WiFi. If the original poster genuinely believes that this isn’t the case, he is, to put it charitably, smoking crack. Unless this guy uses only purely text-based websites, with no graphics whatsoever, there’s no way that is remotely possible.
Furthermore, 2G doesn’t support simultaneous voice and data. Therefore, if you’re attempting to, for instance, use a headset to talk on the phone while navigating with the Maps application (as one might commonly do whilst driving), Maps will cut out if you try to take a call, since the maps depend on internet connectivity to load.
While BT and WiFi are usually unnecessary, killing off the 3G for the sake of battery life, is honestly pretty damn stupid. In my area, the 3G network is around 5 times faster than the 2G on average in terms of data speed. You may get a few more hours of use, but you’ll waste far more time waiting for stuff to load than you’ll save by avoiding a recharge.