Have you been looking for battery saving tips on iPhone 5 quite a lot? Yes, your iPhone has a mediocre battery that gets you going for a day of usage, and if you are lucky, a little more than that. You may really have to work less and keep it locked more often in order to keep the charge.
Have you ever wondered how iPhone 5’s battery which is 1440 mAh delivering 3.8 Volts of power can perform better than iPhone 4S’s 1430 mAh battery giving 3.7 Volts? [Learn about battery parameters]The answer to the question is in the Apple chip used on iPhone 5 as well as the software on the smartphone—iOS 6.
In terms of high-tech hardware and software engineering, nobody comes close to Apple. Remember the first iPhone keynote by Steve Jobs, in which he mentioned a quote by a famous computer programmer, Alan Curtis Kay,
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.Apple has always followed this strategy of making their own hardware and software, so that they get the most optimized products out.
Apple iPhone has obviously medium hardware—dual core A6 chip clocked at only 1.3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, and 1440 mAh Li-Po battery. With such small hardware specs, iPhone gives stellar performance. You can’t even compare it to the competition, where you have Samsung Galaxy S3 with quad-core 1.4 GHz processor and Droid DNA with quad-core 1.5 GHz processor.
Apple makes iPhone’s hardware specifically to run iOS in the most optimized way, and the company makes iOS to efficiently use the available iPhone hardware. This is the main reason why iPhone cannot run other mobile operating systems like Android and iOS cannot be run on devices by other hardware manufacturers.
This is the reason why Apple’s mediocre battery gives such amazing performance on iPhone. Put it in Galaxy S3 and you may drain the same battery in three hours. Let’s find ways to improve the battery life on your iPhone 5.
1. Control the Display
iPhone, just as other smartphones, comes with sensors like the Ambient Light. This means, the phone knows what lighting conditions you are in and can adjust according to that. You should turn on this feature to save more power. You will not notice any difference in the display clarity because your iPhone will increase the brightness when you are in daylight and will dim the screen when you are in darkness, so that the clarity of the display is always even.
If you want to go one step further and keep the display as dim as possible, you can do that too. You probably know the display is the one component that consumes the most of your phone’s battery.
Do it from Settings->Brightness and wallpaper.
Another option you should tweak is the auto-lock time. The smaller the better. Go to Settings->General->Auto-Lock.
2. Tradeoff Between Wi-Fi and 4G
You probably know well that all kind of data connections can easily drain battery. Your iPhone’s data connections come in one of the two ways—3G or 4G LTE and Wi-Fi. While 4G connections are like voice calls—over the cellphone tower—the Wi-Fi connections are through something like a Wi-Fi router at your home or a Wi-Fi hotspot in an airport.
The currently available LTE (in most parts) is not true LTE. It is a combination of 3G technologies like GSM, HSPA, CDMA, etc., and 4G LTE. I won’t bore you with more technical details on this. But the end result is that your iPhone probably needs to be constantly connected to both a 3G network and a 4G network in order to get you that data connection. As a result, it consumes more battery than 3G only phone should, while in fact true 4G LTE should consume much less power than 3G.
In comparison, Wi-Fi always consumes much less power. Hence, it is always better to switch to Wi-Fi for browsing when a hotspot is available. If you are using a jail broken iPhone, you can go with an app called BattSaver that can do this for you.
3. Use Airplane Mode During Travel
You know what happens during your travel? iPhone constantly keeps changing the tower it connects to. It is like taking a continuous phone call, and it will drain your battery pretty quickly. It is always better to turn iPhone into Airplane mode during travel to stop accessing the tower altogether. This can be done from Settings.
4. Configure Data Use By Applications
You need to turn off ‘data Push’ option and check for data less often from apps like Mail. To do these settings, go to Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendar. You can check your email periodically or you can do it manually in order to stop it from running the data connection all the time.
Another important setting you can configure is the location service. Apple iPhone 5 uses Assisted-GPS (A-GPS) to get a location fix on your phone. This is makes use of your data connection in addition to the built-in GPS chip to locate your phone more accurately. On some carriers, this data access is counted toward your total data access and is billable. You should disable location services when you don’t need it. You can do this from Settings->Privacy->Location Services.
[Update]
One important thing to speak about is that you can now have carrying cases that charge your iPhone on the go. One of them is Mophie Juice Pack Air
that retails for 99 dollars at Best Buy. That product not only protects the iPhone, but also recharges it to provide you with additional usage time. However, it adds a slight bulk to the back of the smartphone.
Conclusion
Apple sadly did not include a big battery with iPhone 5, big like the one found in Samsung Galaxy S3 (2100 mAh) or Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD (3300 mAh). However, that would have increased iPhone’s weight considerably from the current 112 g. Also, it wouldn’t have been so thin.
Battery has never been Apple’s real concern during the design of iPhone 5. They wanted to make the phone as thin and light as possible with better performance. That is why they used a Li-Po battery instead of a Li-ion one. Li-Po batteries can be built thin and light and in the shape you want.