One of the things I had never thought to try on my iPhone (well, not consistently anyway) was to turn off wi-fi when there were no networks available. This really came down to two things: 1) when I first picked up my iPhone 2G I remember having read somewhere that wi-fi didn’t use up very much power while active and 2) I hated having to go to my first iPhone home screen, tap on settings, tap on wi-fi, and then toggle the radio off. It’s a little tedious, and until today I didn’t think it was worth the trouble.
The thing is, now that I’m enjoying the magical sliding magnificence of SBSettings, that wi-fi toggle is only one status bar swipe away at any point in time, and from within any app. That’s more like it! As a test, I decided to try and turn 3G and wi-fi off for the entire time I was at work. I was away from a charger for about nine hours and got home with my around 70% charge, as opposed to the 45-50% I was used to seeing with wi-fi on all day. I think this is pretty impressive battery life, for two reasons:
1) I’m running some jailbreak apps in the background.
I’ve got Elert, mQuickDo, SBSettings, and the grossly underestimated Notifier app at all times. I’ve taken a pretty cautious approach to all of this jailbreak goodness, but I’m impressed I was able to get some kickass battery life while still running some useful apps.
2) I’m running push Gmail with Google Sync
Instead of having to check for e-mails every 15 minutes, messages appear on my iPhone when the web server receives them. I’m not trying to explain push Gmail to you — I’m just really pleasantly surprised that I was running this on EDGE for nine hours and only lost 30% of my iPhone’s charge!
There might be a couple of other things I could tone down (turning off location services or lowering brightness — as per recent Lifehacker advice via @aliciabankhofer), but I think the wi-fi radio is the factor that makes the biggest difference. I already run around with 3G off most of the time, but now that SBSettings makes toggling radios on and off so convenient, I think wi-fi will likely stay off as well.
How about your iPhones? Are those figures — 45-50% after nine hours of standby with light usage on EDGE alone — consistent with your own iPhone 3GS experience?
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TAGS: 3G, battery life, Edge, SBSettings, wi-fi
