Friday should be a day devoted to freebies. My free app list was empty so here’s a free tip I picked up this week that surprised me at how effective it is. What is one thing all of us want in our iPhones above all else? More battery life.
Most folks I know from the ranks of family members, co-workers, and neighbors just barely make it through the day on a full charge, regardless of iPhone model. The exception is iPhone Plus models which have larger batteries and may have extra juice at the end of the day.
My iPhone X has settled down, most of the apps I use have been updated, and I find battery life to be about the same as my previous generation iPhone 7 Plus, which means the day ends with somewhere just north of 20-percent battery life remaining. That includes a FaceTime call or two, plenty of texts, browsing, and more email responses than I care to admit. Yes, I take photos and videos and play a game or two while riding on L into downtown Chicago.
This week I tried a few battery saving tips I picked up and after just a couple of days I’m surprised I had not read or tried these before. Take your pick.
Low Power Mode – this is remarkable. You get a warning to go to Low Power Mode when the iPhone’s battery charge hits 20-percent, but I charged my iPhone overnight to 100-percent, unplugged it the next morning, and turned on Low Power Mode. That cuts down on background activities, turns Mail from Push to Fetch, puts Siri into manual mode, but text messages still arrive on time.
The end result was well more than 50-percent battery life at the end of the day and my iPhone did not miss a beat.
Goodbye Wi-Fi – after two days of using Low Power Mode I tried to get through the day without Wi-Fi. I unplugged my iPhone in the morning, downloaded the day’s app updates (more of them pop up for weeks every time Apple introduces a new version of iOS), then switched off Wi-Fi entirely and relied only on my AT&T signal to get me through the day. Guess what?
Dropping Wi-Fi moved the battery needle from 50-percent to 60-percent. Yes, I used more bandwidth but I’m paying for it anyway.
Black Wallpaper – iPhone X comes with a colorful OLED display manufactured to Apple’s specifications by display maker Samsung. OLED displays may not use quite as much battery juice as Apple’s well refined LCDs, but juice is juice. OLED displays black by simply turning off the pixel which means less battery juice is used. So, I added the black wallpaper to my Lock screen and Home screen. That got me another 5-percent of battery life– up to almost 65-percent at the end of the day.
You could employ a few other tricks like going to dark mode on various applications, or using the inverted colors options to put white text on a black background but I consider that to be a bit extreme. As it stands now, with just those items mentioned above, I use less than half the iPhone X’s battery charge in a full day.
Sweet. Easy. Free.