diego's weblog

As I mentioned in my earlier post, the battery life of the iPhone 3G was a complete disaster for me, but I had noticed this is the old iPhone with the new firmware as well, so I did some experiments. Apple has a list of things you can do to improve battery life which is, if you ask me, pretty ridiculous, including “disable 3G” and others that are tantamount to throwing away your shiny iPhone and getting a RAZR. Here’s two small things that worked well for me:

• Disable push. Yep, this could be a deal-braker for some people, but I switched push to checking every 15 minutes and battery life improved remarkably.
• Disable “Ask to Join Networks”. For Wifi, the default settings of the iPhone have it scanning for networks to join, even if areas where you wouldn’t use WiFi. Disabling this also helped significantly.

For the moment, just the two I mentioned are enough for me, we’ll see in more extended use over several days if these two “fixes” are, as they seem now, enough to make the phone usable.