E-book tips for iPhoners—to stretch their battery life
I can read hour after hour on my iPod touch, but Paul Biba has complained of the battery life on his iPhone.
Sensibly, Paul has already tried lowering the screen brightness and turning off 3G. He might do the the same with his phone’s BlueTooth capability if he isn’t using it.
A shorter turn-off period for Auto Lock—to a minute—might also help.
iPhone Hacks has yet other tips, as do other sources.
So, gang, what are you doing to conserve power with your iPhone or Touch so you can keep reading longer between charges?
And how much time do you get—allowing for different variables, such as the use of the iPhone as, gasp, a phone?
Meanwhile big thanks to Paul, gizmo user extraordinaire, for raising this issue in an e-book context.
Technorati Tags: iPhone,iPod Touchch
August 18th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I have been conducting battery life tests on my ipod touch using a page-turning robot that my 13 year old son built for us at Fictionwise. It takes an entire day to run a single test so results are still very preliminary. But we are doing controlled tests of different settings to find out what the “bang for the buck” is in terms of battery life.
Each test has to be run multiple times to ensure repeatability, but our set up allows us to have a robot turn the page every 15 seconds (by default) and an optical sensor rings an alarm when the screen turns completely black.
So far on ipod touch I can report the following figures, but they are preliminary because as I said they have to be repeated to confirm. Backlight percentages were measured using calipers on the slide bar, accurate to within less than 1%.
Settings: ipod touch 8gb, ereader 1.1, normal video mode (black text/white background), medium font, page turn 15 seconds (in medium font that seemed to be a good average of several different people to read a typical page), page turn animation ON, orientation locked portrait.
Backlight 100%: 4.5 hours
Backlight 50%: 7 hours
Backlight 33%: 9.5 hours
Backlight 0%: 15 hours
I am running a 25% backlight test now.
Regarding backlight, I find 30% or so is great for indoor reading, which is where I usually read, so we’re talking 9 to 10 hours for ipod touch in that situation which is pretty darn good.
We did one test to see if inverse video made any difference. We had a robot failure (that was when it was just built) so the test was invalid, but compensating for what went wrong it appeared to me that there was no difference. So unless inverse video allows you to reduce backlight I don’t think that saves you anything. But we have to repeat that test to be sure because as i said we had a few problems and had to stop/restart a couple times.
We will of course be running tests on the 3g after we finish up with the touch.
We will also test things like: does font size matter? (larger font = faster page turn time), does page animation matter? Does orientation matter?
-Steve P.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:04 am
This one should be obvious, but I’ve found turning off wi-fi on my iPod Touch increases the battery life by a significant amount.
(Sorry, I haven’t timed it or anything.)
August 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Placing the iPhone in Airplane Mode is the quickest way to turn off all of its radio equipment, including 3G and/or EDGE, wi-fi and the phone. That will definitely help to stretch battery life, though of course it also disables phone calls (which might be a good thing if you’re trying to get focused on your reading).