In an effort to spare my lovely bride from the banjo-playing donkey that starts up in her head every time I start droning on about phone battery issues and how I want to sort out my cellular situation, I am going to attempt to get it all down in print here. \u00a0Love you, sugar ;]<\/p>\n
* Battery is still at the forefront of my mind because iOS 7 on the Verizon iPhone 5 isn’t getting any better. \u00a0Ars Technica repeated their tests yet again<\/a> and saw only a slight improvement when going to an AT&T phone, and no improvement when disabling cellular connectivity or Background App Refresh altogether. \u00a0They point out that the new iPhones are not that much better – there’s just something about the iPhone 5 and later that doesn’t work well with their looped-Safari-browsing test. \u00a0Which test, as they say, makes up for what it lacks in reality with what it provides in reproducibility and consistency across devices.<\/p>\n * In my week out of town, I always had the charger pack attached to the phone, but I only had to enable it once. \u00a0For the most part, I wasn’t hitting the phone as hard as usual, especially because I was doing all of the driving when I wasn’t tailgating hard or stuck on a plane with no network. I ended up only flipping the switch on the battery pack once, but I also routinely ran the phone below 20% before plugging in for the night. \u00a0Fortunately, we slept in a house with a Verizon tower in the back yard pumping out a strong 5 bars, so it could have been much worse.<\/p>\n * Before I left town, I hard-wiped the phone and reinstalled iOS 7, setting up from scratch with no restore from backup. While out and about, I upgraded to 7.0.2. \u00a0I also turned off all of the following: screen animation, Siri raise-to-speak, background app refresh, auto-brightness (set to about 33%), Bluetooth, all system location services save for compass calibration and cell network search, Frequent Locations, and iTunes Store auto-update. \u00a0The only apps with Location Services enabled are the ones that need it – transit apps, weather apps, and a couple of location-aware journaling apps like Instagram. \u00a0In short, I’ve more or less disabled almost all the new feature in iOS 7; no slick 2.5D parallax view or self-updating apps or traffic alerts in the Today screen for me.<\/p>\n * With this setup, my phone dropped from 98% battery to 88% battery in a stretch where it only played podcasts for an hour and a half (the actual elapsed time was longer, but I didn’t play continuously). \u00a0In this iPod mode (but with networking still alive), the battery dropped 1% per nine minutes. \u00a0After I ran out of podcasts, I disconnected the headphones and only used it to check the usuals – Reeder, Instagram, mail, the like – and in 14 minutes of active use dropped the battery another 6%. \u00a0Worth noting: an hour of audio playback in airplane mode while traveling only consumed 1-2% of battery.<\/p>\n