Improve your battery life
The iPhone battery life is a much discussed topic, and whilst I think a day is ok for a smartphone battery to last, anything you can do to make it last longer is a bonus. The other day Steve and I were playing around with some settings and we believe we have found the best tip to increase your battery life by at least double and it’s so easy!
The big question is how? Well I won’t mess around, you simply switch off Spotlight Search. When we tried this it seemed almost too easy to be true, but amazingly it works and so many people we have spoken to didn’t even know you could switch it off. You may also note that this is the same “fix” that was reported for 3G users running iOS 4 who are having performance issues, so it’s clear that all that indexing is a resource hog. After all, if it can bring a perfectly capable smartphone like the iPhone 3G to a grinding halt, surely it’s doing something to the performance of your iPhone 3GS or 4. Anyway, that was the theory on which we decided to give this a go.
The old way
Personally I don’t use spotlight, and neither does Steve or many others that we have told, and for me switching it off makes no difference to my day-to-day use of the iPhone. You see the thing is I come from the days of the 1st generation iPhone where Spotlight Search wasn’t a feature and when it first came out I didn’t use it as it wasn’t something I was used to having. It’s not something I ever think about using either, if I want to search the web I open Safari, if I want to search my contacts I open Contacts and so on, in fact the only thing I might have used it for was to search for an app, but even then I didn’t really use it (and now that we have Folders and I have one or a maximum of two screens of apps I never will).
Search still works elsewhere
Talking of which, the only thing you will lose by switching it off is searching for apps. If you open mail, contacts, calendar, notes…. whatever has search, you can still search! The only thing is it means is you have to open the app to do the search and having Folders and the Fast Switcher really does negate the need to search for your apps. You can also still search the web or Wiki from Spotlight.
A cleaner Spotlight Search
Interestingly when I was telling one of the other guys about it and I said “the best thing is that searching within apps still works” he said “actually the best thing is that it’s now really easy to search Wiki or the Web” and this is so true because they are now your only results.
This also works for the iPad, although the iPad has excellent battery life anyway so you may not need to do it. Also as it’s not running iOS 4 yet and therefore no Folders or Fast Switcher you may want to leave it on, but if you do decide to switch it off the instructions for that are below. Just to note though; because you are running a version of iOS 3 you have to leave at least one of the options ticked. I left notes ticked as it’s not an app I use very often and therefore doesn’t need to index it.
So how do you switch it off? Easy.
On iPhone 3G:
Go into “Settings –> General –> Home Button –> Spotlight Search” then untick all of the options.
On iPhone 3GS and 4:
Go into “Settings –> General –> Spotlight Search” then untick all of the options.
Untick all options
On iPad:
Go into “Settings –> General –>Home –> Search Results” then untick all the options (except one)
Untick all except one
To give you an idea of battery improvement and what you might gain here’s a little about my usage trends. I consider myself to be an ‘average’ to ‘mildly heavy’ user of my iPhone. I have four email accounts, two set to push and two set to fetch every 30 mins. I have 3 calendars, again two set to push and one set to fetch and I regularly text and call. I use safari a lot and use lot of data (500MB plan is only just enough for me). I also play games (GodFinger is my fave at the moment) and have apps installed for developer testing. Bluetooth is always on, Find my iPhone is enabled and brightness is set to max (auto brightness off). I am on XT in Christchurch so signal searching isn’t an issue.
*At most*, previously my battery would last from 7am fully charged until approx 9pm the same day when it would hit 20% or less. Since swicthing off Spotlight……. 100% at 7am day one to 31% at 10:30pm day two!
So that’s more than double what it would previously last. Steve has had very similar results as did others that we have spoken with.
Give it a go and let us know how you get on in the comments. Already doing it…? Then why didn’t you tell us before! (Oh and tell us in the comments how you get on).
I’ve tried this for a couple of weeks. For the time that I’m not actually using my iPhone, the standby batter life certainly seems to have improved quite a bit. However, thanks to multi-tasking and the like, I’m using my iPhone 4 much more than I ever used my 3G, so I still end up having to charge it just as often!
(B Gallagher has made 71 comments)