Is this normal for an iPhone 4...?

[Doc]

If I do not take care to disable 3G, WiFi, notifications, Bluetooth and Location Services it will burn through up to 7% or so of the battery charge per hour in standby mode.

If I disable all of them then it only eats about 1% of the battery charge per hour in standby mode.

If I play a game, it goes through anywhere from 15-25% of the battery per hour (with all that stuff I mentioned turned off).

This is a brand new iPhone 4.

...I don't suppose anyone has released a "Location Manager" app akin to the Location Manager on a Mac...?

[rz]

How many apps are running in the background? Once I learned how to kill apps running in the background, my battery life increased dramatically.

[silvarios]

Doc is coming from Symbian. His expectations of battery life are lofty. Good Symbian phones have impressive battery life.

14 hours of standby battery life with all that running is about right for an iOS device. Games on my iPod touch destroys my battery life. So does Skype, but not as much as the games.

[Doc]

silvarios wrote:
Doc is coming from Symbian. His expectations of battery life are lofty. Good Symbian phones have impressive battery life.

You're right.

Even with a 4 year old battery, my Nokia could be on standby for a week with 3G and Bluetooth enabled.


> How many apps are running in the background? Once I
> learned how to kill apps running in the background, my
> battery life increased dramatically.

I was under the impression that -- excepting music players -- when location services and notifications were off iOS 4 essentially reduced their CPU use to zero when they weren't in the foreground.

Should I restart it to end all of those processes before I sleep it? That'd be very annoying. This thing takes a full minute to boot.

[deckeda]

Mine's jailbroken, running the original iOS still, and I have the free SBSettings installed through Cydia. By itself it's merely a shortcut to turning on/off the services you mention. But there's another app that costs (something) that uses SBSettings to create a "Location Manager" of sorts that may do what you want. If I recall it could be setup to turn certain services on or off depending on what time of day it is and so on.

I have an iPhone 4 but can't recall what "Location Services" is for it at the moment. But any sort of "push" notifications (Mail, Facebook, Skype?) are going to eat battery life at a faster rate than say, Bluetooth, WiFi and 3G.

Installed apps are a huge variable here. Before I learned how to use Navigon I'd neglected to "cancel" it when I got to a destination and it damn near killed the battery in 2 hours. I'm not a gamer but would expect anything that keeps the screen going and uses the CPU isn't going to be a serious drain on any portable device.

[IronMac]

It sounds about right. Gaming is a real battery killer on mine.

My biggest worry right now is that when I connect it to the MBP, iTunes does not start up automatically as it did when I first got the iPhone less than a week ago.

[deckeda]

Doc wrote:
...

I was under the impression that -- excepting music players -- when location services and notifications were off iOS 4 essentially reduced their CPU use to zero when they weren't in the foreground.

iOS can reduce an app's CPU use to essentially zero, but doesn't unless it needs to in order to run something else you requested later.

Doc wrote: Should I restart it to end all of those processes before I sleep it? That'd be very annoying. This thing takes a full minute to boot.

No, but you can kill them manually without doing that.

From Lifehacker (and other sources)

"To remove an application from running in the background, just pull up your quick switch drawer (double-tap the home button), then tap and hold on an app (like you do when you want to delete an app from the home screen until you see a red minus sign (-) on the corner of the app's icon. Tap it to kill the app."

And there are non-sanctioned apps for jailbroken phones that have different methods for managing running apps.

But remember what I said above about how an app runs in the background (my Navigon example). It's not so much a running background process that kills the battery, it's what the app is DOING in the background that might kill the battery (which is why killing it might result less anguish if it's not clear what it might be doing.)

[Doc]

deckeda wrote:
No, but you can kill them manually without doing that...

Man, that is SUCH a PITA.

...

IronMac wrote:
My biggest worry right now is that when I connect it to the MBP, iTunes does not start up automatically as it did when I first got the iPhone less than a week ago.

Is it set to launch automatically in the Summary section when you click on the iPhone's device-icon in iTunes?

[IronMac]

Doc wrote:
[quote=deckeda]
No, but you can kill them manually without doing that...

Man, that is SUCH a PITA.

...

IronMac wrote:
My biggest worry right now is that when I connect it to the MBP, iTunes does not start up automatically as it did when I first got the iPhone less than a week ago.

Is it set to launch automatically in the Summary section when you click on the iPhone's device-icon in iTunes?
A. Agreed. Just tried the Lifehacker trick and there are a lot of apps in there already.

B. Yep, set to launch automatically.

[Doc]

IronMac wrote:
B. Yep, set to launch automatically.

'Got the iTunes Helper app in your Accounts->Login Items list?