Extend your iPhone’s battery life in seconds

On a good day I used to be able to count on getting about a day’s worth of use out of a fully charged iPhone 4. I sort of thought that was the norm until I recently read an article by David Gewirtz, that detailed a tip on improving your iPhone’s battery life. It turns out that changing the duration of how often your iPhone fetches new data can take your iPhone’s battery life from days to weeks.

I have to admit that I am a pretty heavy user of my iPhone, so I hadn’t even given a second thought to the battery not lasting more than a day. However, after changing the Fetching to less often, I can now say that my iPhone can go days without a recharge. The fetching part was pretty obvious, but how much battery life it saved was a shocker.

One thing I should mention is that if your setup is complicated like mine, it’s going to take some tweaking. For example, I sync my Contacts and Calendar to Google via Google Sync’s servers. I also use the built-in Mail client on my iPhone for sending and receiving e-mail manually. So, my settings involved a deeper dive than most, but the end result is still an extended battery life.


If you’re wondering how to get started, go to Settings, and then the Mail, Contacts, Calendar section. From there you can change the duration of the Fetch, and / or shut off Push. It’s obvious once you get in there, since there’s even some text left by Apple that specifically states that you should “fetch less frequently” for better battery life.

If you really want to save your battery, you can also perform some of these actions:

• Shut off location services -- just turn them on when needed
• Lower your brightness setting (shut off Auto and slide the slider)
• Shut off Notifications, or just modify them by App

The tips above are the ones that have saved me the most battery life. Even with my power-user tendencies, which include snapping photos, taking videos, surfing, and talking on the phone all day long, I still have been going days without charging, since making some of the tweaks suggested above.

If you have power-saving tips, share them below.