TIP: Boost your battery life – turn off location services

Battery Life - Tricky to Manage

Battery life on the iPhone is a contentious issue that is endlessly debated in forums the length and breadth of the internets. Apple’s claimed 300 hours standby for the 3GS may be achievable… but you’d have to never turn the screen on and have practically every feature disabled. However don’t dismay – there are some practical steps you can take to boost your battery life and over the next few weeks we will be sharing some tips with you that could have you scrambling for your charger far less often.

This week, my top tip is to turn off location services when you don’t require it. Location services is what lets apps like Google Maps use the GPS capability of your phone to provide you with services that are relative to your current location. It’s a neat feature but it’s a massive drain on your battery and leaving it on full-time means that with moderate usage you’ll probably be charging your phone every 18-or-so hours.

To turn location services off, hit ‘Settings’, then ‘General’. Turning it off means that when you launch an app that would normally ask you for permission to use location services, it will simply tell you that the service is unavailable and you should switch it back on in the settings to use it. The downside is that if you do wish to use it, there are a couple of added steps to switch it on, use the app and then switch it off again. If you can deal with this, though, you will reap the rewards of a much longer battery life.

Yesterday, as a test for this very article, I turned location services off and charged my iPhone 3GS to 100%. It reached capacity at 9:30am and I unplugged it straight away. I then carried on using it as I normally do – one or two calls, a handful of texts, some Sonic the Hedgehog(!), and I turned it back on again briefly and used Google Maps for my 15 minute drive home, while also playing music. At home I used it for some web surfing and some more games, some blogging, a couple of photos and by 10pm I was still showing around 70% charge.

This morning, I texted my Dad in the UK who had just heard about an earthquake that struck here last night, I played some music during my drive and walk to work, used Beejive to IM with a friend and as I write this at 11:33am I have approximately 30% of the battery left. Impressive compared to the 18 hours I was getting before and considering what I’d been doing on the device.

The thing to remember, and that I often have to remind myself of, is that this thing isn’t just a dumbphone and we’re never going to get the week-long charge that our old black and white Nokia used to get. It’s practically a micro-laptop and no battery is going to power one of those for a paricularly long time. Given how easy it is to charge via USB and the fact that for most people a USB socket is rarely more than an arm-stretch away, juicing these bad boys up is hardly an effort – but with our tips we hope to keep those arm stretches to a minimum for you.

Got any tips you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments.