I love all the services available in iOS 7 for my iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. However, left unmanaged means you’ll be making more trips to the charger. Your iPhone and iPad are very location aware, but this can be a drain on your battery and while I usually have most of these services on, if I’m trying to stretch out my battery life then adjusting a few of these (even if temporarily) will help quite a bit.
Let’s start with that big beautiful display – Reduce your brightness
I recently noticed how bright my iPhone was because it was set to auto brightness. I’ve found auto brightness tends to make the display very bright even when you don’t need it. Simply turning off Auto Brightness and lowering the brightness manually to a comfortable level will make a big difference. Your display and the amount of time it’s on is one of your biggest battery drains.
Turn off WiFi when you’re not on WiFi
With WiFi on, your device is constantly checking to see if any known networks are around so that it can connect and so that it can give you more accurate location data. If you’re in one spot for a while and you’re not on WiFi, simply swipe up the Control Center and turn it off. While you’re there turn off AirDrop too. Hey, if you’re not using Bluetooth devices you can turn that off too.
Turn off Parallax
iOS 7 introduced the ability to see a neat parallax effect as you tilt and pivot your device. It’s cute, but it also uses more processor to do it. Turn it off. I think you’ll even forget that you turned it off. This is done by setting the accessibility settings to “Reduce Motion = ON”
Disable Location Services (App by App now)
In the past you either could turn Location services ON or OFF. However, now you can turn them off for Apps that don’t need it. In other words the fewer apps checking location the better your battery life should be. Turning off Location Services completely would save even more juice, but I would dare say that many of your apps would be a lot less functional without it. However, if it’s an emergency and you need your phone to be on long enough to make it to a charger then turn Location Services off completely until you can recharge.
Background App Refresh
Now in iOS 7 and later you can choose which Apps are allowed to refresh in the background or more importantly, NOT allowed to. While you probably want your GPS navigation apps to updating in the background while you take a call, do you really need your “coupon” app updating? The more Apps you can turn off here, the better your battery life will be.
The Bottom Line
It’s easy to get sucky battery life on your iDevice. Simply turn everything on and leave it that way. It’s no different than turning every appliance, light and device in your home on. Your energy bill will rise. So manage your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch the same way. Improve your iPhone or iPad battery life by making choices about which services you need on and when. I anxiously look forward to iOS 8 which is supposed to have a feature to finally tell us which of our apps are using the most juice. Can’t wait!
