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iPhone 3G Battery Woes; Some Tips Worth Trying.

While the iPhone 3G has been well received for many of its innovative technologies, the inordinately limited battery life has been a major cause for concern for many users.

Undoubtedly, many of you have already experienced the lack of adequate battery life in your iPhone 3G. While we all expected the iPhone 3G’s battery life to be…well, short lived, many did not prepare for just how limited it would actually be.

A press release issued by Apple on June 18th states that:

“…the iPhone will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback. In addition, iPhone will feature up to 250 hours—more than 10 days—of standby time.”

While these specs may seem adequate, many users, including myself have experienced far lower levels of use. A variety of issues may be causing this, including:

• faulty battery indicator
• overactive Push mechanism
• application flaws
• hardware defects

If you think you’re suffering from unusually short battery life, try the following procedures:

Turn off Push: The iPhone 3G’s Push functionality for Exchange and Mobile Me accounts can destroy battery life. Turn this option off in “Settings” and compare your new battery life to the old.”

Force-quit applications: If an application quits unexpectedly and you notice poor battery life afterward, relaunch the application then force-quit it by holding down the home button for several seconds. This can eliminate problematic or hung processes that might be draining the battery.

Reset iPhone: In some cases, simply resetting the iPhone can resolve signal strength issues. Hold down the home and sleep buttons simultaneously until you see the white Apple logo, indicating that your iPhone has restarted.

This procedure can right a faulty battery indicator and eliminate applications that have hung or are otherwise improperly chewing battery.

Reset network settings: Tap Settings, tap General, tap Reset, tap Reset Network Settings. This will cause your iPhone to restart, and will delete any stored Wi-Fi passwords as well as DNS settings and more. It can resolve signal strength issues in some cases.

Tips via iPhone Atlas.

Additional Thoughts: Not being able to make it through an entire day on one charge is not only aggravating but could cause some serious issues for users. If the tips mentioned above prove to be useless, you may try pursuing this report on increasing battery life for the first-gen iPhone, in which some fixes may still be applicable. Or you could just beg Apple to build the next iPhone with a swappable battery.