Extend battery life of your iPhone 3G with tips from Apple

If the battery life on the older iPhone was average, the battery life of the new iPhone 3G is even worse for some obvious reasons. First, it takes a lot of battery power to run the 3G feature and secondly there is no provision for an additional battery. Unlike other phones that allow you to change the batteries, iPhone doesn’t provide that option. I stumbled upon a page on Apple that talks about some commonsense pointers to extend the battery life of your iPhone. Let’s explore these tips and prolong the battery life of our iPhones.

Always update the software to the latest - Apple recommends upgrading the software on your iPhone to the latest version. If an Apple engineer finds a way to tweak their application such that it optimizes the battery usage and lowers its consumption, you will benefit from it using the latest update.

Keep your iPhone locked - Locking your iPhone when you are not using it helps save battery life. How? - If you are carrying your iPhone in your pocket, the screen might get activated many a times for nothing. This consumes some amount of battery. To lock your iPhone, press the sleep/wake button and also use the auto-lock feature that will automatically lock the iPhone after certain duration of inactivity.

Turn off 3G - It may sound strange to turn off the 3G on iPhone 3G, but in areas where the 3G coverage is limited, your best bet is to turn off 3G. You will still be able to access Internet using GPRS or EDGE whichever is applicable. This tip is very helpful if iPhone 3G is used in countries like India where 3G network is not yet available.

Minimize use of location services - If you are not going to use location aware services such as Google Maps, turning it off helps you save battery life. To disable location services, go to Settings > General > Location Services.

Minimize use of third party applications such as games that prevent dimming of the screen or keep the screen lit for a long duration.

Turn off Wi-Fi - If you rarely or don’t use Wi-Fi, why not turn it off and save power? Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. But if you use iPhone to surf the web frequently, you should actually use Wi-Fi over cellular data networks.

Turn off Bluetooth - Not everyone uses it that often and if you too don’t, turning it off will save power.

Check the complete list of tips to save battery life of your iPhone from Apple.