All too familiar?
Over the last few months my iPhone’s battery-life had gotten worse and worse, to the point where I could barely make it through a single day without falling below 20%. Most days, I was charging twice a day. So when I stumbled across a tip on an Apple discussions forum which ‘cured’ my woes I was elated. I’ve been testing this tip for the last week to make sure it wasn’t just a placebo effect, and it definitely works (for me at least). So here it is.
It’s as simple as this: reboot your phone once a day. To clarify, by reboot I mean hold down both the home key and the sleep/wake button until you see the Apple logo, and then let go. It takes a couple of minutes for the reboot to complete, but it could add several hours to your battery-life.
I had read that rebooting now and again can cure a number of issues, but I had been of the misunderstanding that switching off (holding the sleep key until the red ‘slide to power off’ screen appears and sliding), then restarting was a reboot. It wasn’t until Dan’s iPhone Basics article last week that I realised I was doing it wrong!
Around the same time I had been checking out the discussions at discussions.apple.com re iPhone battery life when I read a suggestion that went something along the following lines:
1. If you use Microsoft Exchange, delete the account.
2. Reboot
3. Re-add the Microsoft Exchange account.
4. Whenever you go to close Safari, make sure you close all open tabs so that you are only left with one blank tab first.
I performed steps one thru three and charged my phone to 100%, and even right there on the first day I noticed that the battery lasted much, much longer than it had been for the previous couple of months. The next day I repeated the process. I always keep my phone on charge overnight and I take it off charge when I wake up at around 6am. Straight away, I performed a reboot and monitored the battery levels throughout the day. At 1:50pm it was still on 84% and at 7:20pm it was still on 60%. By the time I put it back on charge at 10pm it was on 52%. More than half full after over 16 hours! Normally, I would’ve hit 20% at around 8:30pm.
The next day, I went without the reboot and while I didn’t hit the dreaded 20% mark, it was down to around 30% by 10pm. With that in mind, for the next four days I rebooted each morning and the battery was consistently around the 50% mark at 10pm every night. I figure that 50% after 16 hours is equal to around 32 hours for a full cycle, which is reasonable for a smart phone.
For full disclosure, I always have location services switched off (unless I need to use GPS), have emails set to manual fetch, have push notifications for WhatsApp Messenger and Facebook switched on and don’t use Bluetooth. On all days I made and received a handful of calls, sent and received some texts, checked and sent emails, used a number of third-party apps and was connected via a mixture of 3G and wifi across about a 50/50 split. Naturally, your results may vary but if you’ve not been in the habit of rebooting regularly before now I am convinced you will see a difference by doing this.
To me this seems to confirm the belief of many that there are some serious memory-leak issues with the iPhone, either somewhere in the OS itself or with some third party apps. By rebooting, the memory is flushed-out and any rogue routines hogging memory and therefore depleting battery are shut down. I am extremely happy to have found this solution and would love to hear how it works for you,so if you’ve been experiencing significantly depleted battery life try it out and let us know how it goes in the comments.
I think this is good advice and will give it a try. Interesting what you say about leaving tabs open in Safari, I usually leave at least 1 or 2 tabs open, I take it they run down the battery power even though Safari is supposedly shut down? Thanks Steve!
(Manock has made 37 comments)
That’s my understanding. It seems that although Apple don’t allow background tasks on third party apps, the built-in apps do run in the background. You can see this yourself by opening Safari, typing in a URL and hitting ‘Go’ then closing out to the home screen before the site has had a chance to load. Give it thirty seconds then go back into the app and you’ll see the site has loaded anyway – so clearly Safari is active to an extent even when not open. Anything active in the background is going to consume power.
On Jailbreak, the Backgrounder tool shows applications that are open, including system applications.
Phone and Mail are always open and running.
Safari remains open if you have tabs open (I think…)
And sometimes iPod stays open, unsure under what conditions.
(Mak has made 222 comments)
That would make sense. Cheers Mak! Wonder if the iPod just stays open when music is playing.
My 3GS was needing a recharge each day until I turned push notifications off (which in my case was only facebook). I now get 2 days out of it! I didn’t reboot.
(Ivan has made 32 comments)