Shortly after getting my iPhone I went to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, a 4-day folk music festival. During the festival I was camping, and had very limited access to electricity (available by making a trip back to the car). The iPhone has been criticized for its battery life. During normal usage, I have no problems with it. I dock it each night and the battery makes it through even the most demanding days of usage. But what if you are in the woods and need as much life as possible? Here are some notes I made to get your iPhone in the lowest power mode I could imagine. These are in no particular order, and I haven’t attempted to quantify how much of an impact each of these has.

  1. Turn Off WiFi! This seems obvious, but is easily forgotten. There are no WiFi access points in the woods so don’t waste battery looking for them.
  2. Change Email Checking to Manual. Your iPhone will always be checking for email in the background. This wastes power. Change the check to manual and be careful about launching Mail, since it automatically starts checking when you launch the application.
  3. Turn off at night. This may sound dumb, but if you aren’t worried about getting calls, turn it off!
  4. Turn BlueTooth Off! You can spare your BlueTooth headset while camping, and turn off the BlueTooth in the iPhone to save some juice.
  5. Turn Brightness Down! This is a big one. That super-brigh, crystal clear screen isn’t free. The iPhone has a strong backlight. Go into settings and turn it all the way down and disable automatic brightness (you must do both!).
  6. Turn Sound Off, and Vibrate Off. If you aren’t worried about getting called, put the iPhone in silent mode and disable vibrate to save a bit more juice.

If you have other suggestions or ideas, feel free to add a comment.