April 26, 2011

If you’ve purchased and iPhone or an iPod Touch, chances are you know the great battery life they hold. For example, the iPhone 4 with 3G on has over 7 hours of battery life. The new iPod Touches have even more. As we all know, the older a battery gets, the less battery life a full charge gives you. I’m actually pleasantly surprised that my 3 year old iPod Touch still carries the amount of battery life it does. However, I have done a few things to help keep it that way. Here are a list of a few things I’ve done with my iPod Touch to increase it’s battery life.

1) Turning Wi-Fi Off – The battery saver that I’ve found works the best has to be turning off my Wi-Fi when I’m not using my iPod. Yes, it may be a bit of a pain to always go back into settings to turn it on when I need it, but the benefit in battery life saved is far too great. As long as your iPod or iPhone is on, it’s always searching for a Wi-Fi network. This drains your battery power significantly the more you enter and leave Wi-Fi areas. I always turn mine off when I’m not using it.

2) Turning Push Notifications Off – This one kind of goes hand in hand with turning the Wi-Fi off, the only difference is I leave the notifications off even when I turn the Wi-Fi back on. I understand I’m losing out on one of the great core functions of the smart phone, but I figure I can go without knowing my best friend’s daughter just ate her first vegetable until I actually sign in to Facebook.

3) Only Charging When In The Red – Some people don’t really believe in only charging your battery when it’s in the red, but I do. I have an HP laptop that I always charged regardless whether it needed to be or not. Now I can barely get 20 minutes out of the battery. Only charging my iPod touch when I get the “20%” or even “10%” messages has certainly helped increase my battery life.

I know these sound like fairly steep sacrifices just to save battery life and many of you are probably thinking “these would be a lot easier to do on an iPod Touch than an iPhone” and you may be right. I know that I’ve suggested these ideas to family and friends for both the iPhone and iPod Touch and both are very successful, if you don’t mind the sacrifices.