Tips to Improve your iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c’s Battery Life
iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c come with a
slightly bigger battery than the iPhone 5, which Apple managed to cram into the jam-packed internals of the device by shrinking the size of the logic board,
as seen in teardowns.
But it may be possible that despite the increase, you’re seeing lesser than expected battery life, and here are some tips to reduce battery drain and improve battery life.
The iPhone 5 had a battery rating of 3.8V, 5.45 Whr (1440 mAh), and Apple improved upon this in the iPhone 5s by including a battery rated at 3.8 V, 5.96 Whr (~1570 mAh), and in the iPhone 5c by including a battery of 3.8 V, 5.73 Whr (~1507 mAh).
So we take a look at how to manage your shiny new iPhone 5s′ or your colorful iPhone 5c’s battery life and also provide some tips on how you can extend it.
Understanding Your Battery Usage:
The larger mAh size translates into an improvement of 25 percent in normal usage, as reflected in this usage chart:
- Talk time:
- Internet use:
- Up to 8 hours on 3G
- Up to 10 hours on LTE
- Up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi
- Standby time:
It is important to understand that your battery life will vary as per your usage, so if you listen to your music locally from the Music app and not stream off LTE/3G/Wi-Fi, your battery life would last much longer.
You can check out the usage and standby time since the last full charge via the Settings app (Settings > General > Usage and scroll down to Time since last full charge section). You can also navigate to Settings > Cellular Usage to find out how much time you were on calls, and how much cellular data have you used, broken by app-usage.
Usage is the amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or even during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.
Battery Percentage:
By default, iOS displays the battery level in the top right corner of the status bar. You can keep track of the charge remaining in your iPhone more easily by enabling the battery percentage indicator, which displays the battery left in percentage. To display the battery percentage indicator, navigate to Settings > General > Usage and scroll down and tap on the Battery Percentage toggle to enable it.
Some tips to extend battery life:
- Set Auto-Lock interval so that your iPhone will turn off more quickly after a period of inactivity. To set the auto-Lock interval, launch the Settings app, tap on General and then Auto-Lock and set the atuo-lock interval to either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 minutes.
- You’re probably aware that using Wi-Fi drains iPhone’s battery, but perhaps you didn’t know that one of the most intensive processes that iPhone’s Wi-Fi chip has to do is search for available network. So if this happens in regular intervals, it’s going to have a noticeable impact on your battery. To disable this feature, launch the Settings app, tap on Wi-Fi, and tap on the On/Off toggle for Ask to Join Networks to disable it. Please note that by disabling this feature, your iPhone will join known Wi-Fi networks automatically, but you will have to manually select a network if no known networks are available.
- Dimming the screen helps to extend battery life. You can either lower the default screen brightness based on your preference or turn on Auto-Brightness to allow the screen to adjust its brightness based on current lighting conditions. Launch the Settings app, scroll down and tap on Brightness & Wallpaper and set Auto-Brightness to On. Note: Apple enables it by default.
- Turn off LTE if it is not available in your area (Settings > Cellular > disable LTE/4G)
- Turn off Location services for the following System System services: Diagnostics & Usage, Setting Time Zone, Location Based iAds (Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services).
Apple added a lot of new features to the Notification Center, including Today Summary, Next Destination, Tomorrow Summary in addition to the Stocks widget. You can squeeze the extra bit of battery by turning off all these features by going to Settings > Notification Center > scrolling down to the Today View and turning off whatever you don’t need.
- Heat can degrade performance of your iPhone’s battery. So it is important to keep the iPhone out of the sun or a hot car (including the glove box).
- If you’re on the plane or in an area where there is no cellular coverage then use Airplane mode to increase battery life (Settings > Airplane Mode).
Optimize Settings based on your usage:
The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c offers tons of features, but some of the features comes at the cost of battery life, so it is prudent to turn off things that you’re not using.
- Turn off dynamic wallpapers if you have them enabled by going to Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness and then tap on Choose Wallpaper. Be sure to select one of the wallpapers from the “Stills” category or from your own Photo Roll, and not from the Dynamic category.
- Review the list of apps that are using Background App Refresh by going to Settings > General > Background App Refresh, and disable it for apps you think don’t need to wake up in the background to fetch new data.
- iOS 7 has a number of animations and motion related effects like parallax that aren’t very important, especially if you’re facing battery life issues. You can disable these motion effects by going to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and turn on the switch.
- iOS 7 automatically updates apps in the background, but if you’re not too keen on updating all your apps, you can turn this off by going to Settings > iTunes and App Store > scroll down to the Automatic Downloads section and turn off the “Updates” switch.
- If you hardly use Bluetooth then turn it off from the Control Center or by going to Settings > Bluetooth
- Review the list of apps that are using Location services, and disable it for apps you think can be used without tracking your location (Settings > Privacy > Location Services).
- If you check multiple email accounts on your iPhone, enable Push for only the most important email account/accounts. For other accounts, fetch emails manually if possible for better battery life.
- Spotlight searches a lot of types of content like Applications, Contacts, Music, Podcasts, Mails, Events etc. but you can selectively tell iOS to only search across content you want by going to Settings > General > Spotlight Search.
These days most apps use Push Notification service to alert you of new data, which can impact battery life. We tend to blindly say “Yes”, when an app asks us if it can send Push notifications. So it is a good idea to review the apps that have push notifications enabled. Go to Settings -> Notification Center and disable notifications for select apps. Please note that it doesn’t prevent new data from being received when the app is opened.
- Turn off Siri’s Raise to Speak feature if you don’t use it frequently (Settings -> General -> Siri -> Raise to Speak).
- Turn off Siri if you don’t use it (Settings -> General -> Siri).
- Turn off Personal Hotspot if you’re not using it (Settings -> Personal Hotspot).
- Turn off equalizer setting for song playback (Settings -> Music -> EQ).
Troubleshooting
If you observe a sudden degradation in battery life, it could be due to an app that is hogging your iPhone’s battery life. If you haven’t restarted your iPhone for a while then the easiest solution is to reset your iPhone.
- Force an app to close: If you’ve identified the app that may be hogging your iPhone’s battery life then force it to close. Double tap the home button to go into the multitasking app switcher, and swipe up the concerned app to kill it. You can kill up to three apps at a time by using this method.
- Restart/Reset Your iPhone: Hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.
- Resetting Network Settings: Reset network settings by going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings. This will reset all network settings, including passwords, VPN, and APN settings.
- Restore iPhone as New: If you’ve setup your iPhone by restoring from backup then the battery life problems could be due to some issue with the backup. Try to restore your device (Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content And Settings) and set it up as a new iPhone (this is not ideal). But before you erase all the contents and settings, please take a backup of your iPhone.
- Make a Genius Bar reservation: If there is a significant degradation in battery life and the solutions mentioned above doesn’t help then take it to the Apple Store, it could well be a problem with your iPhone, which may need to be replaced.
Charge Your iPhone:
This goes without saying but it is important to charge your iPhone, so take the Lightning to USB cable and the power adapter wherever you go.
Battery Maintenance:
You should also use the iPhone regularly for proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery. In fact, Apple advices users to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).
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