Tips to improve short iPhone battery life Video

Tips to improve short iPhone battery life Video Transcript

-Hey everyone, I'm Sharon Vaknin for cnet.com here to help improve the terrible battery life that came with iOS 5 especially on the especially on the iPhone 4S. The issue is so bad that Apple is investigating the problem and might release a fix, but until then, I have a few solutions you can try right now. Grab your phone and head to settings to get started. One tip many people swear by is resetting your network settings. First, go to general, reset, and select reset network settings. Enter your passcode if you have one and your phone will restart. This won't erase any data, but you'll have to reenter your WiFi passwords. Now, go to location services and turn off any location services you don't need. These services drain a ton of battery since they force your phone to constantly find your location. The biggest offender in this list is probably reminders because if you set up a location-based reminder, your iPhone will always monitor your location as it waits to activate your reminder. So, you can either disable it here or hold off on using location-based reminder until its battery issue is fixed. Once you turn off these services, head down to system services and disable location-based iAds and setting time zone, which you can turn on again when you travel across time zones. Alright, we're done with location services and the next step is to turn off diagnostic reports your phone may be sending to Apple periodically. So, now head to general about diagnostics and usage and select don't send. This next setting is Siri related and only applies to the iPhone 4S. Go to general, Siri, and turn off raise to speak. This is a handy feature, but it consistently drains your battery by monitoring your iPhone's light sensor to active Siri. It's not fair that we have to disable useful features for better battery life, but until Apple releases a fix, this could be the best solution. If you did all of the above and you're still seeing crappy battery life, some users in the Apple community forum say you should condition your battery. So, let your battery die, which shouldn't take long then completely recharge it by using an AC adaptor. In general, you should do this at least once a month. With these settings in place, you should see your battery life improve, but this doesn't mean Apple is off the hook for this issue. If you have any battery saving tips, let me know on Twitter or my Facebook page and I'll repost them on howto.cnet.com. For CNET, I'm Sharon Vaknin.