Proven Tips to Maximize the Life of the iPhone 3GS Battery

This article is targeted to users of the iPhone 3GS as it is based on my personal experience.  One of the main sticking points with Apple’s iPhone was the limited battery life of the early iPhone.  While this problem isn’t limited to Apple products, RIM’s Blackberry devices have long touted superior battery life even though their AppWorld offering has been sub-par to much newer platforms such as Apple’s iOS4 or Google’s Android.  Even as a recent as December 2010, RIM’s co-CEO Lazaridis indicated that newer, more powerful Blackberries would only come when dual-core processors and their QNX platform were made available to help control power consumption and extend battery life in their upcoming Playbook and Blackberry devices for 2011 and beyond.  So while battery life continues to be an industry challenge to be solved with innovation, consumers must use blackhat ninja strategies to extend their operating battery life on a given charge.

With Apple’s release of iOS 4.2.1, the iPhone 3GS received an upgrade, so-to-speak, in a host of departments to improve its overall functionality. In line with this OS upgrade,  Apple released the iPhone 4 and iPad with the A4 chip, Apple’s first entry into chip engineering and design. The A4 chip has dramatically improved the battery life for the iPhone 4 user now to the point where one charge can last a full day without concern. On the iPad, power consumption and battery charge dynamics have improved the experience so much that the average user can benefit from a full 8 hours of functional use even as Apple touts a 10 hour battery life in their own marketing.  These marked improvements have undoubted deafened some of the noise from previous customers of earlier models.

However, through self-discovery and some brave tinkering, I have discovered that a whole suite of settings on the iPhone 3GS can enhance battery life by a significant margin.  I cannot guarantee the same experience for you for a host of reasons – your phone may be a lot older than my device so the battery may be a lot older or the network configuration of your provider is different which could affect performance.

Nonetheless, here are my proven tips that I took to maximize the life of my iPhone 3GS battery to such a wide margin, I could comfortably operation my email, txt, social media, browsing through a full 8 hour day with a slight performance impact on speed when accessing the Internet.  Beyond this, these tips helped me avoid the need to bring an extra battery pack along for the ride.

Bluetooth

If you are not using your iPhone with a bluetooth-enabled headset or any other device that needs to be paired to your iPhone, disable this setting.  Once enabled, it forces the iPhone to constantly probe for a bluetooth device to maintain an active pairing.  As such, you should only enable bluetooth for actual use and to save your battery in the process.

WiFi

Your phone should not have its WiFi setting set to ON unless you’re actively connected to a wireless network in your home, office or coffee shop.  Otherwise, you’ll find your iPhone probing for active wireless networks constantly while unconnected which only helps to shorten the life of your battery charge.

Notifications

There are some times when disabled notifications are a blessing in disguise.  If you need to focus for an upcoming meeting, or are in an actual meeting, setting notifications to off will limit distractions and noise (even though you can turn off sounds on your iPhone 3GS) and save battery life.  Once you’re done with all your meetings, work assignments or errands, you can enable notifications to start receiving your social media alerts from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla or other similar social location-based applications.

Location Services

This setting can be a huge drain on the battery.  Location-based social apps like Foursquare, Facebook with Places, and Gowalla, are constantly communicating check-in notifications for others in your social network.  But your iPhone with GPS is also transmitting your location real-time for Google Maps and other apps to help with directions or simply to find things to do based on your proximity.  While location-based functionality has become a god-send for people on the go, you don’t need this enabled all the time as it simply affects the performance of your battery. While disabling location services is a small hassle for check-in apps like Foursquare and Gowalla or Places on Facebook, you need to decide whether your battery life or your social life is more important.

Data Roaming

This setting should only be enabled if you are out of zone with your local wireless provider and you want to assume costly data roaming charges from your host provider.  Data roaming simply means that when you are out of network with your host provider (say, AT&T) and are using the data networks for another provider, you are essentially using their services and must pay the rent — as such, your hot provider collects the rent, pays the landlord of the current network you’ve asked, while finding some way to mutually profit from your need to access.  By disabling Data Roaming, you will save more battery life and in the process, any risk of unforeseen charges while on the go.

Enable 3G

This tip has proven to be a dynamite move.  However, you need to be prepared for some quality of service degradation.  If you choose to Enable 3G, almost instantly, you will notice two things.  One, your speed and experience of speed will improve dramatically – give or take a few bad pockets in your host provider’s network.  That said, the experience is generally great.  But the second thing you will notice is the rapid rate at which your battery drains power when using the 3G network.  It is an unavoidable reality that speed of network leads to more battery drain.  To counteract this issue, you could disable 3G and work on Edge or 2.5G.  It is much slower in return for the bonus gain is prolonged battery life – there is always a trade-off. With a non-3G data connection, It may take longer to load pages or use social apps like Facebook, but you will find with more direct use of these apps in addition to browsing and email that your battery life will last much longer.

Based on these measures alone, I have noticed battery improvements in the approximate range 50-60%, if you can believe that.  Many others users have reported a full day of functional usage with these configurations.