Kind of long post but for those interested or willing to pitch in... I keep reading so many conflicting things about certain services and how they affect battery life. The two most significant for me are location services and push email. I have read (and it makes sense to me) that location services won't use up any extra battery life if you don't have the apps that need it running (ie. maps, etc.). If I'm not doing anything on my phone, just in standby mode then leaving it on should not make a difference right? Or wrong?
Second, push email. I understand if you get like 100 emails that yeah it will kill battery life compared to checking manually every once in a while or every hour or whatever. But what if say you get 5-6 emails a day? How often will the phone be pinging the server and how much battery does that use compared to a full "fetch" say hourly? Will it save more battery just checking every hour or by leaving it on push? Yes the best way is to find out by experimenting with it over several days but my 3GS is new and so gets used and it's hard to tell how fast the battery drains simply because I use it everyday for different things and can't tell what might cause the depletion (ie. some days talk more, some days use safari or other apps, etc.) so it's hard to be scientific about it all.
Right now for today my usage shows 2 hours and 25 minutes and about 10 hours of standby with 65% battery remaining (however includes about 45 mins of Ipod-only use while the phone was in airplane mode on the subway). The other usage time includes about 6 mins of calls, about 10-12 text messages, a couple short emails sent and 5-6 received, some safari browsing, facebook app and some sports apps that I checked throughout the day for total usage of 6.3MB's - everything on 3G. Wifi off, bluetooth off, screen at 25% with auto brightness, location services on, no push notifications, push yahoo mail on and another email account set to fetch hourly. Is this normal performance for the 3GS? Can't say I'm displeased with the battery life to be honest. It does easily last the day with comfortable headroom with moderate use like this. Seems decent to me considering this thing is practically like a computer in your pocket. Just wondering mostly for discussion and eeking out the most out of it for the times it is heavily used...
Second, push email. I understand if you get like 100 emails that yeah it will kill battery life compared to checking manually every once in a while or every hour or whatever. But what if say you get 5-6 emails a day? How often will the phone be pinging the server and how much battery does that use compared to a full "fetch" say hourly? Will it save more battery just checking every hour or by leaving it on push? Yes the best way is to find out by experimenting with it over several days but my 3GS is new and so gets used and it's hard to tell how fast the battery drains simply because I use it everyday for different things and can't tell what might cause the depletion (ie. some days talk more, some days use safari or other apps, etc.) so it's hard to be scientific about it all.
Right now for today my usage shows 2 hours and 25 minutes and about 10 hours of standby with 65% battery remaining (however includes about 45 mins of Ipod-only use while the phone was in airplane mode on the subway). The other usage time includes about 6 mins of calls, about 10-12 text messages, a couple short emails sent and 5-6 received, some safari browsing, facebook app and some sports apps that I checked throughout the day for total usage of 6.3MB's - everything on 3G. Wifi off, bluetooth off, screen at 25% with auto brightness, location services on, no push notifications, push yahoo mail on and another email account set to fetch hourly. Is this normal performance for the 3GS? Can't say I'm displeased with the battery life to be honest. It does easily last the day with comfortable headroom with moderate use like this. Seems decent to me considering this thing is practically like a computer in your pocket. Just wondering mostly for discussion and eeking out the most out of it for the times it is heavily used...
