Tips for Improving Your iPhone's Battery Life

Here are tips for improving your iPhone's battery life:
1. Turn off push notifications. This is perhaps the single biggest battery killer on the iPhone. For some reason, third-party app developers love to activate the iPhone's alert feature.

2. Turn off push e-mail. Honestly, I have no problem leaving my iPhone's e-mail app set to manual. When I tap the e-mail icon, it defaults to the "All Inboxes" view. Then it automatically runs a check and grabs all new mail. Otherwise, the mail app does nothing. Perfect.

3.Turn off whatever radios you're not using. The iPhone lets you disable 3G—itself a useful feature for wherever AT&T's HSDPA network isn't up to snuff. But that's also a battery saver. The same goes for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS; the latter is particularly troublesome, as location-based apps often hook into it whenever they're running. Heck, if you're in an area with really weak cellular signal, go into Airplane mode. Searching for a signal is really hard on a phone's battery. Switching to Airplane Mode will also kill Wi-Fi, but you'll be able to play games, read e-books, watch movies, and listen to music.

4. Kill background tasks. You're not supposed to have to do this, but now that the iPhone has multitasking, you may encounter apps that eat up battery by polling the Internet in the background. Skype, for instance, uses quite a lot of battery while waiting for calls. If you fear you're running one of those apps, double-tap the Home button, hold your finger on one of the bottom row icons for a second, and then begin killing background tasks by tapping the little X at the top left corner of each icon.

5. Set display brightness to adjust automatically. Turning down the brightness is obvious, and barely worth a mention. But the automatic adjustment setting is less obvious; activating it means the iPhone will automatically dim its display in darker environments, including seemingly well-lit indoor rooms. That's fine; you don't need the display blaring at all times.

6. Watch the force feedback. Many games take advantage of the iPhone's vibrate feature to simulate force feedback; this can be a battery drain.

7. Get a battery case. Our managing editor Sascha Segan never brings an iPhone to a trade show without a Mophie Juice Pack Air, which doubles an iPhone's battery life. Yes, it makes the phone a bit thicker, but he'd rather have a thicker phone than a useless one.

8. Sync your iPhone periodically. Even if you're not changing any playlists or installing new apps, periodically syncing your iPhone and PC will install the iPhone's latest OS and firmware updates. Some of Apple's updates have improved battery life in the past.