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One reason for iPhone battery problems

May 15th, 2010 No comments

Although there are several causes for reduced battery life on iPhones, I found that this was my problem with a rapidly flattening iPhone battery.

iPhone Low BatteryWhen I first got my iPhone, I found that, after an overnight charge, the battery wasn’t even lasting until the end of the afternoon. The phone was also getting quite warm. I initially put this down to overuse of a new gadget, but even when I wasn’t using it much during the day it was still needing a top up to avoid it dying on the way home. Additionally, this didn’t happen at the weekend when I used the phone a lot more.

I then noticed that while I was at work, owing to the perfectly reasonable company firewall settings, I couldn’t connect to my .mac* or gmail email accounts nor send any email. In order to do so, I would turn off the WiFi to use the GPRS (I’d be lucky to get 3G on O2 despite being inside the M60). I then found that the battery life improved so that the phone would now last all day until late evening.

Basically, what seemed to be happening was that the iPhone was continually ‘banging its head against the firewall’. Rather than realising that it could not connect to the mail servers, it would continually retry, and in doing so and using the WiFi it was draining the battery.

Obviously, as I stated at the opening line, there are several reasons for reduced battery life, but check that your iPhone is not needlessly wasting power on futile WiFi connections.

* Yes, I know it’s called MobileMe now