Those last drops of juice

[hithere]

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Yesterday I forgot to charge and the battery of my iPhone 4 was below 10% when I started my day. As an emergency measure I cut data off and switched to 2g network. Astonishingly, after one day of work and a good deal of calls, I still had juice when I got back home.

I would be happy if Apple could offer as an option the automatic swich to a feature phone below say 5%. I guess that with some optimization of the os functions this "last drops mode" could allow for a full day of (crippled, of course) use away from a power plug.

 

[Small White Car]

Oh, man. I'd love that.

You could set it so that at 20% battery life your mail switches from push to manual. The screen brightness lowers. Wifi turns off if it's not connected. Notifications change from your regular settings to your 'B' settings, so only your most important apps update you. GPS is deactivated. And so on.

And then, when you charge, they all come back on. This is a great idea. I don't want to actually disable those things, but when I'm getting in trouble I'd gladly do without them.

 

[Xgm541]

this would work only if I was allowed to turn the battery saver feature off if i wanted, even if i phone was at 1%. Blackberries cant do that, and it pissed me off. At <5% your cell network would turn off completely and you couldnt do anything about it.

 

[pooleman]

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Yesterday I forgot to charge and the battery of my iPhone 4 was below 10% when I started my day. As an emergency measure I cut data off and switched to 2g network. Astonishingly, after one day of work and a good deal of calls, I still had juice when I got back home.

I would be happy if Apple could offer as an option the automatic swich to a feature phone below say 5%. I guess that with some optimization of the os functions this "last drops mode" could allow for a full day of (crippled, of course) use away from a power plug.

How did you switch to the 2G network (edge)? Are you using an older iPhone/iOS? I thought the ability to turn off 3G was removed with the latest software update.

 

[bp1000]

I switched off 3G for most of the charge after 5.1 was released just to test. Got a massive 9 and a bit hours usage and something crazy like 3 days standby.

Useful to know.

Ive always thought that mobile phone developers should build in auto switching. So, idle, your phone should just operate on 2G/Edge and when data apps are requested it automatically switches to 3G.

All you would do is mark your app as data required, so when you open safari, youtube, mail, twitter etc your connection auto switches to 3G. As soon as you switch away or you sleep your phone it reverts back to 2G after say 90 seconds.

The benefit is perhaps quite small as most power is consumed with the screen on and WIFI or 3G using power and mainly the CPU sapping power loading web data or videos. But it might help with idle power consumption and it typically uses less power to maintain a 2G signal than a 3G signal.

 

[hithere]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

How did you switch to the 2G network (edge)? Are you using an older iPhone/iOS? I thought the ability to turn off 3G was removed with the latest software update.

With 5.1 the switch is there. I think it came back with the last update.