Tips to Improve your iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c’s Battery Life [Video]

iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c come with a slightly bigger battery than the iPhone 5, which Apple managed to cram into the jam-packed internals of the device by shrinking the size of the logic board, as seen in teardowns.  

But it may be possible that despite the increase, you’re seeing lesser than expected battery life, and here are some tips to reduce battery drain and improve battery life.

The iPhone 5 had a battery rating of 3.8V, 5.45 Whr (1440 mAh), and Apple improved upon this in the iPhone 5s by including a battery rated at 3.8 V, 5.96 Whr (~1570 mAh), and in the iPhone 5c by including a battery of 3.8 V, 5.73 Whr (~1507 mAh).

So we take a look at how to manage your shiny new iPhone 5s′ or your colorful iPhone 5c’s battery life and also provide some tips on how you can extend it.

Understanding Your Battery Usage:

The larger mAh size translates into an improvement of 25 percent in normal usage, as reflected in this usage chart:

• Talk time:
  • Up to 10 hours on 3G
• Internet use:
  • Up to 8 hours on 3G
  • Up to 10 hours on LTE
  • Up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi
• Standby time:
  • Up to 250 hours

It is important to understand that your battery life will vary as per your usage, so if you listen to your music locally from the Music app and not stream off LTE/3G/Wi-Fi, your battery life would last much longer.

You can check out the usage and standby time since the last full charge via the Settings app (Settings > General > Usage and scroll down to Time since last full charge section). You can also navigate to Settings > Cellular Usage to find out how much time you were on calls, and how much cellular data have you used, broken by app-usage.  

Usage is the amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge. The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or even during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.

Battery Percentage:

By default, iOS displays the battery level in the top right corner of the status bar. You can keep track of the charge remaining in your iPhone more easily by enabling the battery percentage indicator, which displays the battery left in percentage. To display the battery percentage indicator, navigate to Settings > General > Usage and scroll down and tap on the Battery Percentage toggle to enable it. 

Some tips to extend battery life:

• Set Auto-Lock interval so that your iPhone will turn off more quickly after a period of inactivity. To set the auto-Lock interval, launch the Settings app, tap on General and then Auto-Lock and set the atuo-lock interval to either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 minutes.

• You’re probably aware that using Wi-Fi drains iPhone’s battery, but perhaps you didn’t know that one of the most intensive processes that iPhone’s Wi-Fi chip has to do is search for available network. So if this happens in regular intervals, it’s going to have a noticeable impact on your battery. To disable this feature, launch the Settings app, tap on Wi-Fi, and tap on the On/Off toggle for Ask to Join Networks to disable it. Please note that by disabling this feature, your iPhone will join known Wi-Fi networks automatically, but you will have to manually select a network if no known networks are available.

• Dimming the screen helps to extend battery life. You can either lower the default screen brightness based on your preference or turn on Auto-Brightness to allow the screen to adjust its brightness based on current lighting conditions. Launch the Settings app, scroll down and tap on Brightness & Wallpaper and set Auto-Brightness to On. Note: Apple enables it by default.

• Turn off LTE if it is not available in your area (Settings > Cellular > disable LTE/4G)

• Turn off Location services for the following System System services: Diagnostics & Usage, Setting Time Zone, Location Based iAds (Settings >  Privacy > Location Services > System Services).