Followup: I’ve got 99 problems and an iPhone 4S battery ain’t one

A couple of days ago we posted about some quick tweaks to help you get the most out of your iPhone 4S battery. I didn’t think it would matter much at the time, but it turns out those tweaks we mentioned really do help with the battery. Pre-tweakage, we got about a full workday’s worth of battery life, taking the iPhone 4S off the dock at 8 AM and then having to place it back on the dock around 11 PM on a daily basis. That norm pretty much continued, plus or minus an hour, depending on usage patterns, and without the implementation of the tweaks we mentioned.

After implementing the tweaks, we went from about a 15 hour day (including idle time) to a 38 hour and 17 minute day. To be fair, that was over the course of a weekend, and usage time was only 6 hours and 17 minutes of that total. That being said, it was a huge increase in battery life.

Long story short, the point we want to emphasize is that Location Services really does affect your batteries lifespan. By tweaking the location settings to better match your needs, you’ll be able to greatly increase the amount of time between recharge sessions. For instance, I don’t use traffic information, so I turned that off in my settings.

If you’re worried about iPhone 4S battery problems, and you’re on the fence about still picking one up, I’d recommend against waiting. The battery likely isn’t the problem in most cases. The problem seems to be way too many location based applications running at once. Turning some of them off, based on need, certainly helped me get through the day without worrying about running out of juice, and it’ll help you too.

If you want more info on what we did, you can check out our recommendations here.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio