Me battery done. Where me charger?
Aha! Finally the culprit to my quickly-depleting battery is becoming clearer… and I blame push-sync!
Previously on IntoMobile we had suggested tips for extending the battery life (here), and I followed up with my investigations on to what could be the primary battery hogs (here). Having turned off pretty much all the radios in my device, I was then left with only a couple of candidates:
• Any apps/processes I was unaware of that could be running (and eating power)
• Anything specific that was running in the background (i.e. push sync)
A restart cured me of any hangover processes that might be running, which left me with one candidate – push-sync! This is now turned off, and so my calendar (the thing that was being synced) is now only synced when I open the app specifically – in a very manual fashion.
You see, it’s all very well having all the radios and network dependent apps turned on if you have access to a mains charger, but otherwise they can (and do) give the battery a bit of a kicking. So right now I am running:
GPS – OFF
3G – OFF
BLUETOOTH – OFF
WIFI – OFF
REGULAR FETCH (for email) – OFF
PUSH – OFF
You might argue that this limits the functionality of the device somewhat, and do you know what, I’d agree… but this process was designed to find out what exactly it was that “canes” the battery – as a raver would say!
Now that I’m aware of what the key battery killers are, the next thing is to find out whether things I would like to either use, or leave on, are also battery shredders. Those things would be 3G radio functionality, and also Bluetooth – since having that on is great for auto-connecting to my car kit.
It ain’t over yet – next time I hope to have a definitive set of suggestions in order to combine functionality and battery life. But it would be great if Apple could aggregate all these features in to one place with a series of graphical switches (as our readers have suggested) – then you could alter ad-hoc as you pleased! Apple, are you listening?
Ben