6 Ways to Extend Your iPhone Battery Life After Updating to iOS 7.1 Apple's latest mobile operating system update is a battery-sucking vampire. Fight back fast with these easy tips and tricks.
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No one likes a dead iPhone. If you recently updated yours to iOS 7.1, you know how much of a drain Apple's latest mobile update is on its battery life -- and on your patience.
Don't despair. We've got you covered with these six quick and easy iPhone battery boosting tips and tricks. You'll be back up and running in no time (hopefully not into people and walls and stuff while walking and texting).
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1. Trim the fat: shut down all unnecessary apps. If you're done posting selfies on Instagram, close it. While you're at it, shut down your email, Safari, Facebook, Twitter, or anything else that's open and doesn't need to be. Apps left open continuously leech power from your battery continuously. No bueno.
To shut down open apps, double-click your iPhone's Home Button and swipe up on each one to close it. Boom. Done.
2. Let the Wi-Fi rip. Enabling Wi-Fi helps your iPhone gobble up less power when you're doing something on it that needs to access data. To enable Wi-Fi, go to Settings, choose Wi-Fi and log into a Wi-Fi network. Good to go.
3. Chill on the screen brightness. Turning on the Auto-Brightness feature stretches your battery life by allowing the screen to adjust according to the current lighting conditions. You can also simply manually dim your screen.
To enable Auto-Brightness, go to Settings, choose Brightness & Wallpaper and set the Auto-Brightness to On.
To dim your screen brightness manually, go to Settings, choose Brightness & Wallpaper and drag the slider to the left, kind of like rejecting a match on Tinder, but way less cool.
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4. Ditch push notifications from apps. They mostly annoy you anyway, right? No one wants LinkedIn push notifying them every time a hiring manager wants to connect or a Facebook pop-up informing them that their ninth grade geometry teacher just commented on their status. Actually, we love most app push notifications (especially the retweet kind from Twitter), but, alas, they are big-time battery life suckers.
To turn them off, go to Settings, choose Notifications, then select the apps you want to disable and tweak your notification settings for each.
Pick from the following:
-- Change Alert Style to None.
-- Turn Badge App Icon off.
-- Turn Sounds off.
New notifications will be received when you open your push-happy apps again.
5. Fly in Airplane Mode in places with low and no cell coverage. Your iPhone blows a lot of battery juice trying to keep a connection to the local cellular network, which could suck up more power in low- and no-coverage areas. To combat this problem and boost your battery power, switch to Airplane Mode by going into Settings and selecting it. We don't suggest trying this trick if you're expecting an important call; Airplane Mode doesn't let you make or receive calls.
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6. Give location services the shaft. Apps that love location services, like Google Maps, Siri, Flipboard, to name a few, are notorious battery life slayers. To see which apps have recently used location services, go to your iPhone Settings, select Privacy and choose Location Services. From here you can turn off location services for individual apps.
To disable Location Services altogether, go to Settings, choose Privacy, select Location Services and simply switch the feature off. You are now off the grid. Well, mostly.
Tell us: What are your favorite iPhone battery life-saving tricks? Do share in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you.
