Category: iPhone and iOS

With iPhone 4S and iOS 5 out in the wild, there are many users expressing their concerns about the battery life, blaming it on both the OS and the device itself. I've been using iOS 5 since the first beta and iPhone 4S since the day it came out. So far, I have been quite impressed with the battery life. I posted some tips for the early iOS 5 beta testers previously and those still stand true, but I thought I'd share my recent findings with you all.

Now, you may find that some of the features listed below are crucial to you. That is fine, but the more you can afford from the list the better. By the way, you may notice that I don't mention screen brightness. I like mine to be set on full and it's not really iOS 5 or iPhone 4S related. But yes, screen brightness is usually one of the top tips for better battery life.

Here we go:

• Disable Weather and Stock widgets in Notifications.
• Disable Location Services for Reminders. This one is a real killer and I recommend to not use the feature until the process is perfected.
• Go to Settings - Location Services - System Services and set Setting Time Zone, Location-Based iAds, Diagnostics & Usage to OFF. Turning off Compass Calibration will also help.
• Disable spotlight search for anything you don't actually use.
• Check your locations services settings. Do all those apps need to have access to location services?
• Ping used to cause battery drains, and since I never use it, I disabled it in Restrictions (settings - general - restrictions).
• Go to Settings - About - Diagnostics & usage and select Don't send.
• Use fetch rather than push for your email accounts.
• Are you using Bluetooth? If not, turn it off.
• If you are an iPhone 4S user, turning "Raise to speak" for Siri off will help you save some juice.

I have no evidence that the below does improve battery performance, and I have doubts that it does, but this appears to be quite a popular solution. I, personally, ignore this step, as I don't see how exactly it can improve battery life, but you may want to give it a go:

• Delete your MobileMe mail account or iCloud account if you already migrated/signed up (settings - mail - etc...). Make sure you save data on the phone if you are deleting your iCloud account.
• Do a hard reset.
• Set up iCloud or MobileMe again.

There seem to be quite a lot of people testing iOS 5 Beta 1 and although I find the number of testers to be unusually high, this could be a good thing, as Apple have enough time to collect all the feedback and deal with it before the fall. One thing people fail to understand, is that the software they are running is not a public release and it is a given, that bugs exist. Battery life seems to be the major gripe and there are quite a few tips around the web on how to improve the experience with iOS 5.

I have been running iOS 5 for a week now and I must say the release is very stable. I am yet to find any major issues. Notifications are extremely useful and I believe had been very well implemented. I have tried different tips on how the battery life can be improved and I think have I managed to achieve the same level of performance, if not better, that I would experience on iOS 4.3.3.

• Set it as a new phone rather than restoring from backup
• Do not set up iCloud
• Turn off Weather and Stock widgets in Notifications under Settings
• Turn off push for email
• Turn off Location Services for Reminders
• Turn off Bluetooth
• I also turned everything off in Spotlight Search, which I never use. I am not sure how much effect this has on the battery life though

Having done all of the above, my iPhone 4 running iOS 5 Beta 1 has seen a lot of improvement in battery life. I had it running for 3 hours now with WiFi and 3G on, full brightness, 15 minute fetch for emails, some browsing and a 15 minutes worth of phone calls and the battery is at 84%.

Another thing is, that with any new software we tend to use the phone a lot more than we would on day to day basis, which of course drains the battery. I keep reading reviews, where people send over 200 SMS messages in 2 hours. How?.. Why?

I am really enjoying iOS 5 Beta 1. I am actually slightly worried that the beta releases to come could make it worse, as Beta 1 is almost perfect.