Steve Dotto here.
How are you this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling somewhat drained, like my iPhone battery.
Why is it that I have a smartphone and I now spend my life looking for AC outlets to move
from as I go through the day because my battery does not have the same stamina as do I?
Are you in this boat?
You find that the battery in your iOS device just does not last your day.
Let's face it.
We're talking about iPhone's here.
The battery sucks, does it not?
And here is the frustration that I have.
Everything I read online, all these battery nix are telling me to turn off this service
and turn off that service and turn off this service and basically turn my smart phone
into one of these.
If I wanted one of these, I would still have one of these.
I want a smartphone, one that knows where it is, one that can assist me through the
day.
So here is our mission: we are going to take on iOS seven and we're going to find seven
things that you can do that will extend our battery life without giving up our smartphone.
Does that make sense?
Let's do it.
All right, I've got my iPhone ready to go.
You can see it here.
Let's see seven things that we can do to extend our battery life.
Actually before I begin, this is something that so often we don't do.
We use our phones so much that we often don't realize how many open apps we have, how many
different applications that we have open.
If I take a look here, this is just a couple days' use of my phone and look at all apps
that I have open that I do not need to have open right now.
So what you got to do is you've got to go through and just swipe up, double tap on the
Home button, open all of the different apps that you have or to see all the different
apps that you have and then turn them off.
Maybe this is something that you should do last thing in the evening before you go to
sleep every night.
Make it a routine.
Just close down all of the apps that you're not using.
They open fast enough when you need to open them but while they're open there in the background,
they're taking up resources.
They're using power.
This isn't even one of our tips.
We're starting with a bonus tip -- coming up with a habit for extending your battery
life.
That way in the morning you don't have to do it.
Anyways, that's a great start, is it not?
Okay.
Now the first I want to talk about is Location Services, which is always one of the first
thing that battery nix talk about as far as you've got turn off your Location Services
if you want to get a lot of battery life out of your iPhone.
But this was the one that drives me the most crazy because Location Services are incredibly
awesome and powerful if you use them correctly.
I like my phone knowing when I get home because I use it for my reminders.
I set reminders saying, when I get home, remind me to do this and if I turn off my Location
Services, then it doesn't know when I get home.
So using Location Services, while they have an impact on our privacy which is not what
this conversation is about—it's about battery life—while they do have an impact on privacy,
they also have a massive impact on our battery life.
But I want them because I use them.
So I think what we need to do is we need to begin looking at all of the different resources
on our iPhone and just pare them down to the ones that we really want to use.
We don't want to neuter our smartphone and turn it into a dumb phone.
We want to make sure that we have enough battery resources available for the services that
we do use and our goal is to leave the house at 7:30 in the morning and come home at 5:00
or 6:00 in the evening with still some reserve of power left in our phone, still using our
phone for the day.
So that's always been my goal.
So let's begin with Location Services.
Now where you go in to turn off your Location Services?
Actually, it is under the Privacy Settings.
So Apple, they just hide things all over the place on us in iOS.
Now there's a really good reason for the way they do the menu and structure but I find
it quite confusing.
So unlike what the battery nix say, turn off Location Services, no, no, no, no, no.
Leave Location Services on but then decide which apps you want to have access to Location
Services.
I've done a pretty good job at this one.
I want my camera.
I want CardStar, which is my loyalty card app.
I want my Compass to have it.
I want Evernote to have it.
Facebook, I don't really care because I don't really post that often on Facebook.
So I'm going to turn off that one.
I do want Google to have it.
FourSquare, I use it a lot because I check it a lot.
You see what I'm doing here is I'm going through and deciding which apps actually need to know
where I am at anytime and so far—Starbucks—that's good.
It's only apps.
So I'm in good shape as far as this one here goes.
I've only got the apps that I want to have access to having access.
So that's it.
So Step 1-Location Services, go through, take a look at which apps are accessing your GPS
basically, which is a big power hog.
This is one of the biggest ones that we can do.
So Location Services is number one.
Number two is dealing with the background apps and your content refresh area.
So these are automatic downloads and things that are going to be running in the background
on an ongoing basis.
So where we go for that is we head back into our Settings and we choose our General tab.
We choose within here our Background App Refresh.
Open that up.
Now this tells us—it says allows apps to refresh content when Wi-Fi or cellular is
used or Location Services in the background.
So turning off apps may help preserve battery life.
Then why are they always turned on?
Why don't we go in and turn them on if we want rather than turn them off.
But I'm complaining.
So I'm going to go now through—BBM, I don't even use BBM.
I should probably uninstall BBM.
Leave CardStar, Couch-to-5K, I haven't been doing that nearly as much.
Dispatch, an email client, I don't need that.
So this is turning off all of these ones that you don't need to give access to.
Expensify doesn't need it.
Facebook doesn't need it.
Okay, Foursquare, Gmail doesn't need it.
Oh yeah, I like Gmail.
Google, Google Maps, we'll leave.
The little arrows tell me which ones that I have turned on in Location Services.
So now I'm just going to through and I'm going to turn off all the apps that I don't think
really need access in the background.
So I'll continue with this.
If you're working along with me, this will take you a few moments.
Continue to do it.
Oh man, look at all these apps that have background access.
There we go.
Done?
Okay.
Next up, Spotlight, Apple's search and indexing capability on the phone is incredibly powerful
but the phone has to process every bit of new data that comes in in order for it to
be found.
So Spotlight is effectively.
It's the same as we use in our computer.
It searches all of the different data that's on your phone so that your search is effective.
But there are a lot of things you don't need to search and you don't need to have Spotlight
continuously indexing.
This is something you're not going to even know is happening.
As it's going through, you've gotten new email coming in, it's going to index that email
as it comes in.
So once again for you determine whether you use search, if you never use search on the
phone, if you've never search to go to look for something on your phone then turn off
all of this.
But if you do use search, what areas are you searching for?
I'm not talking about internet search.
I'm talking about searching for data on your phone.
So here we go, Spotlight Search and choose what you can search for.
See, I search for contacts all the time so that's a good one to leave.
I search for applications.
Rather than navigate to the applications, I use the search bar to go to applications.
I never search for music so I can turn that off.
I never search for podcasts; I can turn that off.
I never search for videos.
I never search for audio books.
I'm going to leave searching for notes on.
I never search for events.
I always search my mail.
I never search in my voice memos.
I never search in my reminders but I do search in my messages.
So now I've turned off a whole bunch of things that Spotlight will try and index as soon
as new data is brought into the phone.
That again should be a net win as far as I'm concerned.
Now I use Siri all the time and I actually didn't notice this new feature in iOS 7.
Now that I noticed it, I kind of want to use it but I'm not going to use it because it's
a power hog.
It's a waster.
Siri has a feature which is a Jester-based feature.
We go into General Settings>Siri and here they've got Raise to Speak.
This means that I just basically click down on the Home button and hold to invoke Siri
but you can barely just lift it up like this and Siri will wake up.
If you think about that, Siri waking up every time you move the phone, that's probably a
little bit excessive.
It uses the accelerometer which does use up power.
So if you have tried and turned on Raise to Speak because it sounds uber cool, turn it
off if you're not using it.
If you are using it, again here's the thing.
If it's a feature that you use, keep it and then get rid of something else.
It's kind of like being on a diet.
If you need to be able to have a little bit of ice cream for dessert, well then don't
eat as much salad.
I don't know.
But anyway, if it's something that works for you, use it.
If not, get rid of it.
Next up, let's adjust our notifications.
Oh look, I just got a notification.
Someone just sent me an email.
Did you get the sense that every single app in your iPhone is a five-year old child crying
out for attention and they just constantly have to pop up on your screen, letting you
know what's going on?
That's the Notification Center happening.
All of the apps want to be pushed forward onto your screen and let you know when something
is updated.
In some cases that's useful, email coming in, text's coming in.
All of that you should know about.
But other things such as a new version of Talking Ben, maybe not so important.
So let's deal with the Notification Center.
Hey, did you know this?
If you swipe down on your screen, it brings up your Notification Center and it's got all
of these different ways of looking at things, including a calendar view which shows you
all of your notifications for today, all of your notifications in total and the ones that
you've missed.
I hardly even use that.
I typically just look at the notifications on the lock screen as it's coming in so I
see if there's something important that I have to deal with.
But that seems to be kind of useful now that I'm kind of playing with the Notification
Center a little bit more.
Having said that, I still plan to be ruthless with the Notification Center.
We find our controls just under Settings in Notification Center.
Now here it allows us to choose whether or not we want to keep those views, the ones
that I swiped down and saw, the notifications in the today view and if we want to keep those.
So I'm going to say yes, except look at this, they include stocks in the view.
I don't need to know about stocks.
Why would they leave the turned on?
Do all iPhone owners out of the box, does Apple expect us all to be investing in the
stock market on an ongoing basis?
Get a grip, Apple Okay, I turned off stocks.
There's a good start.
Here it is now.
Are you ready for a long process?
Sit down, grab a cup of coffee and make sure your battery is well charged because it's
going to take you a little while to go through this.
Each of the apps that I have installed in this phone requests being part of the Notification
Center.
Take a look.
30/30 down there show in the Notification Center?
No, I don't want to show you in the Notification Center.
So you basically have got to go through all of these apps that you don't want to include
and then just make sure that you include the ones, Instagram I want to, Hootesuite I kind
of want to, LinkedIn, no.
I don't really care when somebody sent me a little notice in LinkedIn.
I mean I do care but when I'm on my computer is often enough.
I don't need immediate access to a LinkedIn message.
TheScore, actually I do because I want to see the score in a hockey game.
Shazam, I see no reason that Shazam has access to the Notification Center, and so on and
so on and so forth.
So go through your Notification Center settings, turn off everything that you don't need and
determine if you want to use it at all.
That is the next tip.
Actually, I think I've turned off a lot already.
Have you turned off a lot already?
I'm getting some hope that my iPhone battery life might be extended just through this process
that we're going through right now, which is really the purpose of this video, is it
not?
Next up, some actually quite simple things to do.
We're through the heavy lifting as far as I'm concerned at any rate and this is one
that I don't know why we don't pay more attention to but I like to turn off—make sure you
have turned it off—Bluetooth.
Turn it off if you're not using it.
You can do that just by swiping up and choosing Bluetooth in the menu there.
You know what?
If you're out and traveling about and you don't need Wi-Fi, turn off the Wi-Fi and then
turn it back on when you need it.
I hope I didn't wreck my display here.
You can turn off Wi-Fi when you're not using it.
That's another way.
Now that's something you have to kind of remember how to do and this is one of the areas that
I wish that Apple had included near field communication because with some Android sets,
with some Android handsets, when you get in your car, it will turn off your Wi-Fi and
turn on Bluetooth because of the near field communications.
When you get back home, it will turn off Bluetooth and turn back on your Wi-Fi and things like
that.
But Apple has not chosen to go down that path and who are we to question the wisdom of the
folks at Apple?
And the last thing to set is turn down the brightness if you don't need it.
Turn down the brightness on the iPhone screen if it's not needed.
It's very quick and easy to turn up the brightness if you need it.
You can just swipe up and then you can turn up the brightness.
It actually doesn't change at all on my display here on the computer but it is changing here.
That is another way that's going to dramatically save you battery life.
Those are all steps that you can take, the seven steps that you can take, to really improve
your battery life without sacrificing functionality, which as I've said over and over again we
definitely don't want to do.
Locations Services, background refresh, Spotlight indexing, raise Siri to speak if you happened
to have turned that on to play with it, Push Notifications, Bluetooth and brightness, those
steps alone are seven steps that you can take that should dramatically improve your iPhone's
battery life And as kind of a final option, little bonus little pieces here, is once a
month they say it's great idea to let the battery run completely down, completely drain
and then charge it up again.
That resets all of the different settings within the battery and allows the battery
to retain or regain the ability to charge fully.
Finally, if none of those things work for you—that's my dog Farley—and before you
go to the step which I was considering going to which is purchasing and installing, opening
the back and installing a brand new battery, if none of those things work, they say that
if you take your phone and reset it to factory settings—not a restore; don't restore all
of your apps—and then laboriously rebuild all of the different connections and re-download
all your apps, that should also improve that.
There's a lot of things left over from previous apps that sometimes drain the battery and
that is the final, ultimate solution before you go about changing your battery.
But either one of those, changing the battery is a little bit of work, rebuilding you iPhone
a lot of work but it might be worthwhile.
I'm not recommending it.
I'm just saying it's an option.
That was a lot of work today.
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And with that, I am done for today.
Have fun storming the castle!