Sudden Battery Life Loss, Full Recovery

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Of late, I have been vexed to notice that the battery life on my iPhone seems to have dramatically declined. When I got the iPhone, my standby battery time was wonderful. Under light use, the iPhone only needed a charge about once every 8 days or so. Of late though, I noticed that this had declined rapidly, and it seemed to need a charge once every three or so days. I had started to wonder if my iPhone battery was a case of "technology infant mortality" which is to say that it had died early (most technology products seem to either die early or last a very long time).

I was searching the web for any comments on sudden declines in battery life on iPhones when I came upon an article on how to Force Quit iPhone applications. While I had no applications that were stuck, or in need of a Force Quit, this got me thinking. The iPhone is fundamentally a mobile computer. It runs an OS (Mac OS X) and programs just like any other computer. What if there was a background task running that I was not aware of, which was keeping the machine's CPU up late at night? What if the running image had just gotten corrupted and needed a clean up?

In thinking about this, I realized that I had never turned off and rebooted the iPhone since I had purchased it. That is a long time for a computer to run without a restart. I had upgraded the firmware once, when Apple released the latest version, but that was it. So, I decided to completely reboot my iPhone. I powered it off completely and let it sit for a while. Then I powered it back on.

The results were immediate. Standby time is back up to where it used to be. So, either the running image of the software had gotten "sick" or there was some task I had been running (iPod, phone, Google Maps, whatever) that had somehow continued to run in the background and was continually chewing up a bit of the CPU and thus consuming battery life.

The morale of this story? Reboot your iPhone now and then. It cleans up the running software image and ensures best possible battery performance.
 
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Great advice mac57! I'll do that more regularly.

Also, if you're not using wifi, turn it off. At work, our wifi is tedious to access and is spotty on signal strength. I find that EDGE works fine when I'm away from home, unless I am knowingly in an accessible wifi location. Having wifi on when you can't access a wifi network serves to drain your battery. Turn it off to help minimize battery drain.
 
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mac57
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Thanks MO. Yup, I am aware of that one, but I am pretty much always within reach of a WiFi network, and so I keep it turned on. In a battery life vs. performance showdown, I will always chose performance!
 
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Great advice mac57! I'll do that more regularly.

Also, if you're not using wifi, turn it off. At work, our wifi is tedious to access and is spotty on signal strength. I find that EDGE works fine when I'm away from home, unless I am knowingly in an accessible wifi location. Having wifi on when you can't access a wifi network serves to drain your battery. Turn it off to help minimize battery drain.


from what ive read on various forums, wifi uses less battery power than edge. Now, i have no idea what kinda power we are talking though when wifi is in search mode.

that said, i leave my wifi off and only turn it on at home/school, always use edge everywhere else. i get about 3 days on a charge, until im to the point where i dont think i can make another day (not yet at red), and i zap it.
 

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