advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

15 tips for iOS 7 users to get more from the iPhone’s battery

We’ve been hearing quite a few iPhone users lamenting over short battery life now that they’ve updated to iOS 7. Not wanting to leave our faithful readers without a way to access htxt.africa on the move, we have the following guide for making it through the day on an iPhone running iOS 7.

1. Airdrop off (Swipe up to get to the Control Center > AirDrop > Off)

Airdrop is Apple’s take on WiFi direct, and allows you to transfer files directly between any two iOS devices without needing to pair them beforehand. While the feature is useful, if it is left on when you don’t need to send anything it can begin to drain your battery while searching for a device.

2. Disable Background App Refresh (Settings > General >Background App Refresh)

Background app refresh is one of the new features in iOS 7 that allows applications to learn when you use them and to prefetch data in order to be ready for you. This comes in handy if you read the news at 8am every morning and your news reader of choice synchronises content with the server at 7:55 so that it’s all there waiting for you. Unfortunately until many apps are rewritten to use this feature properly they may land up just fetching data in the background and wasting battery to save you a 5 second refresh when you open an app.

3. Don’t auto update (Settings > iTunes & App Store)

iOS 7 will let your apps, music and app updates automatically download when you’re connected to a WiFi network (and even on cellular data if you should so choose). If a bunch of updates or one rather large game file comes through unexpectedly your iPhone could be stuck downloading an update for a few hours effectively killing your battery.

4. Get rid of Frequent Locations (Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services)

In order to improve certain things inside iOS and to “provide useful location-related information” iOS 7 will have this feature turned on automatically. It could prove to be a notorious battery hog as well as being a privacy nightmare. Turning it off seems like a great idea, but just be aware that a lot of services that use it will also stop working.

5. No more parallax motion (Settings >General > Accessibility > Reduce
Motion)

One of the easiest to spot changes in iOS 7 are the parallax backgrounds which give the user the illusion that the icons are floating high above the home screen background. Some people have complained about motion sickness from the feature and others that it drains battery life, either way switching it off will restore your iPhone to a stationary background.

6. Stop Siri raise to speak (Settings > General > Siri)

Siri has gained some much needed additional functionality in iOS 7 and has also made the transition from Beta to full-fledged software. One of its tricks is to use the gyroscope and accelerometer built into the iPhone to detect when you’ve lifted it up to your face activating Siri immediately to listen to your request. This takes more electricity than the energy it saves you in holding down the home button and disabling it is an easy way to save some juice.

7. Limit Spotlight (Settings > General > Spotlight Search)

Spotlight search indexes everything on your iPhone several times a day so that it can be easily searched whenever you need it. Keeping only the sections you would search using spotlight will stop it from indexing unnecessary items and killing your precious battery.

8. Notifications (Settings > Notification Center)

Every app and its grandma wants a piece of the notification center, being front and center gives an app a greater chance of becoming part of your daily routine so it makes sense for developers to push you towards notifications. The problem is that every time something happens on the servers of the offending app, it pushes a notification to you to let you know that someone has just liked the picture of your cat effectively turning your iPhone into a battery sucking pager.

9. Choose a Still wallpaper (Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness)

Dynamic wallpapers are pretty and also pretty good at destroying your battery life. Once the novelty of them wears off (about 4 days) remember to change back to a regular ‘Still’ wallpaper to gain back some of the lost battery performance.

10.Location services off (Settings > Privacy > Location Services)

Location awareness is a great feature for an app like Maps which would have a pretty hard tome giving you directions without knowing where you are but there aren’t many reasons for every other app to have access. Limiting the number of apps means limiting the amount of time your iPhone spends time polling cell towers and turning on the GPS chip to get your location thus saving you even more power.

11.Change from push to fetch email (Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar)

Is your email the kind of thing you need to get as it comes in, the very second it happens? Or can you wait 15 minutes to see it? Do you need email immediacy from all of your email accounts? If you can live without it then disabling the push notifications from your email accounts is definitely a good idea in saving battery life.

12.Disable LTE (Settings > Cellular)

LTE is an awesome technology, it gives you low latency high bandwidth mobile broadband (which is the dream of every geek) but if you have little to no signal at work and at home then leaving it on is a sure fire way for you iPhone to spend more battery power looking for LTE signal than actually using it.

13.Set Auto-lock (Settings > General > Auto-Lock)

If you forget to lock the screen of your phone the display will carry on using power until the auto-lock time. Setting the auto-lock to the minimum time of 1 minute is the next best thing to remembering to hit the power button.

14.Lower brightness (Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness)

The display is the largest power draw on any smartphone and as logic would have it, the brighter the display, the more power it will be drawing. Set the display brightness to the lowest setting that you can be comfortable with day-to-day.

15.Buy a battery pack

If you’re a power user and you refuse to compromise on the smartphone experience to draw out the most from your iPhone then the only thing left to do is to buy an external battery pack with a USB port that will charge your iPhone. Find one with the most mAh of energy available (remember that the iPhone 5 has only got 1440mAh on its own).

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement