Taking Care of the iPhone Battery

Your iPhone comes with a large lithium-ion battery. Apple claims that the iPhone 5 gives you up to 200 hours of standby time, 8 hours of talk time on a 3G network (14 hours on an EDGE network), 8 hours of Internet use on an LTE or 3G connection (10 hours using Wi-Fi), 40 hours of audio playback, 10 hours of video playback, and 225 hours of standby. Those are all impressive times, although you should count on getting less in the real world.

The biggest downside to the iPhone battery is that it is not, in Apple parlance, user-installable. If your battery dies, you have no choice but to return it to Apple to get it replaced. This is all the more reason to take care of your battery and try to maximize its life.

Tracking battery use

Your iPhone does not give a ton of battery data, but you can monitor both the total usage time (this includes all activities: calling, surfing, playing media, and so on) and standby time (time when your iPhone was in sleep mode). Here is how:

1. On the Home screen, tap Settings:
   The Settings app appears.
2. Tap General:
   Your iPhone displays the General options screen.
3. Tap Usage:
   Your iPhone displays the Usage screen.
4. Tap the Battery Percentage switch to On:
   Your iPhone shows you the percentage of battery life left in the status bar beside the Battery icon, as shown in Figure below.
   
   

In the iPhone Usage screen, turn on the Battery Percentage option to monitor battery life in the iPhone status bar.

Note:
If you don't want to clutter the status bar with the battery percentage, you can examine the Usage and Standby values that appear in the Usage screen instead. As your battery runs down, check the Usage screen periodically to get a sense of your iPhone battery use.

Tips for Extending Battery Life

Reducing battery consumption as much as possible on the iPhone not only extends the time between charges but also extends the overall life of your battery. Here are a few suggestions:

• Dim the screen:
  The touchscreen drains a lot of battery power, so dimming it reduces the amount of power used. On the Home screen, tap Settings, tap Brightness, and then drag the slider to the left to dim the screen.
• Cycle the battery:
  All lithium-based batteries slowly lose their charging capacity over time. If you can run your iPhone on batteries for 4 hours today, later on you will only be able to run it for 3 hours on a full charge. You can't stop this process, but you can delay it significantly by periodically cycling the iPhone battery. Cycling "also called reconditioning or recalibrating" a battery means letting it completely discharge and then fully recharging it again. To maintain optimal performance, you should cycle your iPhone battery every one or two months.

Note:
Paradoxically, the less you use your iPhone, the more often you should cycle its battery. If you often go several days or a week or two without using your iPhone, then you should cycle its battery at least once a month.

• Slow the auto-check on your e-mail:
  Having your e-mail frequently poll the server for new messages eats up your battery. Set it to check every hour or, ideally, set it to Manual check if you can. To do this, tap Settings; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars; tap Fetch New Data; and then tap either Hourly or Manual.
• Turn off push:
  If you have an iCloud account, consider turning off the push feature to save battery power. Tap Settings; tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars; and then tap Fetch New Data. In the Fetch New Data screen, tap the Push switch to Off and tap Manually in the Fetch section (see below).
  
  
  
  
• Minimize your Tasks:
  If you won't be able to charge your iPhone for a while, avoid background chores, such as playing music, or secondary chores, such as organizing your contacts. If your only goal is to read all your e-mail, stick to that until it is done because you don't know how much time you have.
• Put your iPhone into sleep mode by hand, if necessary:
  If you are interrupted "for example, the pizza delivery guy shows up on time" don't wait for your iPhone to put itself to sleep because those few minutes use precious battery time. Instead, put your iPhone to sleep manually right away by pressing the Sleep/Wake button.
• Avoid temperature extremes:
  Exposing your iPhone to extremely hot or cold temperatures reduces the long-term effectiveness of the battery. Try to keep your iPhone at a reasonable temperature.
• Turn off Wi-Fi if you don't need it:
  When Wi-Fi is on, it regularly checks for available wireless networks, which drains the battery. If you don't need to connect to a wireless network, turn off Wi-Fi to conserve energy. Tap Settings, tap Wi-Fi, and then tap the Wi-Fi switch to Off.