IPhone Hidden Features: Nine Ways to Extend the Battery Life on your Smartphone Device

Battery drain can be frustrating so here are nine ways to extend the battery life on your iPhone, iPad and Android

Disable the parallax effect

The parallax effect taps into the iPhone’s inbuilt motion sensors and makes the home screen icons float when moving the phone around.

It means that when you tilt your phone (or iPad) the wallpaper moves with it. However it has caused some people to feel motion sick. It also drains battery life. To turn it off go to Settings > General > Accessibility and move the slider on Reduce Motion to ‘on’.

If you have an iPhone 5 you may have chosen a ‘dynamic’ background for your wallpaper. These animated wallpapers move beneath the app icons but they use more battery than a ‘still’ wallpaper. To change, select an image from the ‘stills’ menu in the Wallpapers & Backgrounds menu.

Turn Off Location Services

iPhones and iPads use the inbuilt GPS for many functions, including Google maps. You may be surprised about how many apps also use the GPS but it eats up battery life.

You can turn off all Location Services or just turn it off for specific apps by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.

You can also turn off GPS settings on Android phones which will improve your battery life.

Prevent Background App Refresh

Background App refresh allows apps to refresh their content in the background while you perform different tasks. It is a clever new function of iOS 7 that means that the apps download new content before you open them. It also eats away at your battery life.

You can disable the feature entirely or simply disable the apps that you do not want to continually refresh. Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh.

Fetch data manually

You can set your iPhone or iPad to check your email accounts less often. Data can be ‘fetched’ at specific intervals. The more frequently email or other data is fetched, the quicker your battery may drain.

To fetch new data manually, from the Home screen choose Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Manually.

To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. If you have a ‘push’ email account you can turn it off when you don’t need it. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and set Push to Off.

Don’t automatically update apps

In earlier iOS versions you had to manually update App updates but with iOS 7 they automatically update when new versions are released. It can be a drain on battery life so to manually update apps go to Settings > iTunes & App Store > Updates > and move the slider to off.

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