17 Must-Know Habits of iPhone Super-Users That Save And Extend Battery Life

1. Don’t Play Hot Potato!

Charging your iPhone in certain carrying cases cause the phone to heat up- which affects battery capacity. If you notice that your iPhone gets hot when you charge it, take it out of its case first. Easy peasy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Apple claims your iPhone works best from 32° to 95° F. For storage -4° to 113° F is ok. Keeping your iPhone as near room temperature as possible (72° F or 22° C) is ideal.

3. Need Extra Power? Solar Charger For IPhone

Great for extra power when you need it. Suntrica’s SolarStrap for the IPhone is now available in the United States. And it’s approved by Apple.A lightweight charger which gathers solar energy into an internal battery for instant or later use, it can also be fast charged from main power or from your PC or laptop. It’s $59.95 and the size of a small wallet and it’s weatherproof – available at www.kightenergy.com

Stick it onto your bag, bike or coat so it charges while you are out and about  or simply leave it on the window ledge – and then connect it to your iPod or iPhone when they need a boost.

4. When You Don’t Want Refreshing News

Be wary of leaving your browser running in the background for sites that auto-refresh — some enjoyable culprits include: www.CNN.com and www.Telegraph.co.uk.

5. Download@Home

If you’re a download junkie like me, especially apps & videos, save them for the home if at all possible (or basically, anywhere there’s wifi & a charger available) and not on the road. Relying solely on 3G will take it’s toll.Also, closing apps running in the background and dimming the screen and turning off push notifications are always helpful in extending battery life while on the go.

6. All Things Being Equal. . .

According to the experts (Apple Inc themselves!), when you use the iPod feature to playback audio and use the equalizer feature (EQ), it uses up more power than usual. While some audiophiles might wince at this one, somehow I think you’ll manage…so TURN OFF the EQ! How?Go to Settings within the iPod mode > iPod > EQ and tap OFF.

7. The Three-Charger Solution

Create a great charging system and train yourself to use it. Sure there are apps that measure battery use, and settings you can tweak, but the sanest thing to do is invest in three chargers: one for your desk, one for your car, and one for your bedside table. Then get in the habit of plugging the iPhone in whenever you sit at your desk, drive in your car, or go to bed. It’s tempting to cut corners by using older iPhone or iPod chargers, but some of them don’t charge as efficiently as ones clearly labeled as intended for use with the iPhone 4. (The iPad charger is perfectly fine.)

8. Live The Jetsetter Life

Having two signals running on a super slim battery like the one in the iPhone takes its toll. In fact, you’re using up your battery twice as quickly as you really need to!The best way to prevent it from being a major drain is to just stop it…literally.

Whenever you are in a WiFi zone, first make sure to turn ON Airplane Mode in SETTINGS to turn off your cellular antenna. Then turn ON your WiFi antenna to use the only connection you want and need.

Living the Jetsetter’s life may not be that glamorous, but at least your phone’s battery life won’t crash and burn when you need it most!

9. Bluetooth = Bad for Battery Life

If you want your iPhone to last the entire day, my best advice is turn the Bluetooth off. It is probably the single biggest consumer of battery life from my perspective, and unless you are real-estate mogul or soccer mom driving around in your bluetooth-enabled car all day, there isn’t any reason to have it on.

Cap Your BlueTooth

BlueTooth accessories are great add-ons for the iPhone, unfortunately running BlueTooth all the time also drains your battery. Don’t forget to turn off your phone’s BlueTooth whenever you aren’t using it.

10. Go Into Lock Down

Besides preventing accidental pocket-dialing, you’ll be saving your battery for when you do need to make that call later if you simply adjust your auto-lock preferences.iPhone settings allow you to adjust the time-out period before it locks the screen and phone to standby mode (and turning off the screen, etc)s. Set it to the minimum you can bare – but don’t worry – even 1 minute can be a long time!

I’m Kenny Jahng and I publish www.essistme.com.

11. Don’t be pushy!

That’s right, don’t let push notifications drain your battery. Constantly checking Twitter and Facebook via push notifications can really draw on the battery. Make it simple: Just enable push for something like Mail. Then, setup Facebook and Twitter to send you email notifications. As you get email message notifications, you can either read them or go to the app directly to read and reply.

Don’t Push It

Although there are some applications like Boxcar that I specifically use for push notifications (for Twitter), I try to limit push notifications for all my other apps. I “fetch data” for my email hourly, but I also try and mark emails as read on my computer versus checking email on my phone so that little number on the mail app stays lower. I’m not sure if that helps with battery life or if it’s just a symptom of neurosis.

12. Turn off those notifications

There’s the usual things to save battery life, such as turn off WiFi, etc. but something as simple as turning off those (sometimes annoying) notifications will help as well.

13. Reduce the Vibration…

Many games and apps use the iPhone’s vibration feedback feature. While everyone likes a little vibration, this feature can drain your iPhone battery fast. If you limit the use of this feature or disable it all together, you’ll see a significant increase in your battery life.

Stop Vibrating!

One area most people ignore is vibrate. If you receive a lot of SMS messages, or have set a large number of reminders, or get a lot of push notifications, or all of the above, and you have vibrate turned on, you are using power. Vibrate is a little motor that spins to vibrate the phone, and you are turning it on every time the phone needs to alert you. Turning off vibrate, especially if you get a lot of notifications, can help save some battery life.

14. Location Services Can Be Your Biggest Battery Drain

With the iPhone 4 (And 3GS running iOS 4.x) one of the biggest drains on battery life is Location Services.If you have an app running in the background with location services active it can cut your battery life in half or worse.

You can tell if an app is using location services if a purple arrow shows up in the top bar on the right side. If you see the Purple Arrow and are more interested in saving battery life then one of your apps knowing your current location you will want to turn off Locations Services.

To do so go to the Settings App and then General and then to Location Services.

15. Don’t Always Rely On The 3G, Techies!

Being a college student and the owner of an iPhone 4, my phone is a major source of communication throughout the day while I’m in class, meetings, and at work all throughout campus. Most, if not all, of these campus buildings are wireless activated and therefore, doesn’t require your 3G setting to be turned on. This applies to not only college campuses, but tech-savvy office buildings.

16. Do A Background Check

17. Avoid The Bright Lights

Sometimes it’s better to shy away from the bright lights.Let the iPhone auto-adjust brightness feature do its work when going into different lighting environments – indoors, outdoors, etc, so make sure it’s on and working.  Make sure it’s on in Settings!  The other important thing to do is adjust the default brightness with the slider control in screen brightness settings.