The frustration of a dead battery will be familiar to every iPhone owner. But what can you do to avoid it, other than use your phone less?
Apple is good at squeezing maximum performance out of the hardware in the iPhone and that's one of the reasons that the iPhone's battery is comparatively small. The first iPhone had a 1400mAh battery, and seven years later the iPhone 6 has a 1810mAh battery, although the iPhone 6 Plus has a whopping 2910mAh offering.
Many of the current Android flagships have batteries rated over 3000mAh, but then they have much bigger displays - the 6 Plus aside, of course. But that doesn't mean we still don't struggle to keep our iPhones going for longer, no matter how big the battery pack.
Until the next big leap in battery or charging technology comes along, we'll have to rely on smarts to get the most out of our iPhones. Here are a few simple tips you can follow to get a whole lot more juice from your Apple smartphone.
1. Keep an eye on signal strength
The biggest culprit for rapid battery drain is often a weak signal, but there isn't a great deal you can do about that. If you're in an area with a poor signal then you might consider switching Airplane mode on, which stops the constant searching that sucks the life from your phone.
You should also always use Wi-Fi instead of cellular data whenever possible too, as that offers a more stable connection and will stop all that battery-abusing searching for a signal.
2. Turn off app notifications
Some apps will spam you with pointless news. How many of the notifications you get do you actually want to see? In most cases, very few.
Every one of them is sucking down some battery life, so cut them off at the source. Go to settings > notification centre and tap on any apps you don't want notifications from. Then choose 'none' under the alert style, and turn 'badge icon' and 'sounds' off.
3. Change display settings
Your display is costly to power, so you want it to shut down quickly when you aren't using it.
Go to Settings > General > Auto-lock and see if you can live with a shorter time before the screen auto-locks.
You should also head to Settings > Wallpaper & brightness and turn 'Auto-brightness' off to save some battery. Set the brightness as low as you can and only adjust it up when needed and you'll save a decent chunk of power – although this might mean you can't always see your phone screen in direct sunlight.
4. Stop the animations
You don't need dynamic backgrounds and parallax, '3D' effects. They're fun but they're munching your power. Pick a static image or a favourite photo in Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness, then choose 'Wallpaper' and turn 'Reduce Motion' on in Settings > General > Accessibility.
5. Reduce background refreshing
People imagine that swiping apps closed in the multitasking menu is saving power, but you really need to be taking a look in Settings > General > Background App refresh to really make a difference.
Allowing apps to refresh themselves like this is a big drain on your battery. Go down the list and turn off everything you don't need - Facebook in particular can drain your battery really quickly. These apps still refresh when you actually load them up, which is a lot more efficient for your battery.
6. Get email manually
There's some argument about the benefits of push email (arriving when sent) versus fetch (the phone checks at pre-agreed intervals), and it really depends on how much email you get and how often you have it syncing.
Push should only send from the server when a mail comes in, and it will be more power efficient than checking every five minutes with fetch, but if you get a lot of email then push could drain the battery faster than fetch with a slower refresh time of an hour.
Assuming you're only going to check your email once every couple of hours, getting it manually is going to save you power over both options… but you'll have to actually remember to do it!
