Existing users, 
Push or frequently checked email can slurp iPhone battery
Posted 3 March 2008 @ 4pm in Guides/How-Tos
If your iPhone is exhibiting inordinately short battery life and you’re not sure why, check your Mail settings.
First, if you’re using a Yahoo! account, navigate to Settings > Mail then select your Yahoo! account and choose “Advanced.” Check the “Use Push Mail” setting. If push mail — which allows the iPhone to notify you of new mail as soon as it hits your inbox — is enabled, it can put a serious hurt on your battery life.
For other email accounts, reducing the email check interval to every hour (In Settings, choose Mail then tap Auto-Check) or Manual has significantly increased battery life. If you are going to use a short mail-checking interval, tap the Sounds pane of Settings and turn the option for New Mail off.
For more battery saving tips, see our special report.
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2 Comments
Posted by rwikoff
4 March 2008 @ 12am
I have a similar experience.
Only a few days ago I decided to see what my battery life was, and how I might improve it. With email checking two accounts every hour and my normal mix of calls, music, and internet I got 2 days 7 hours of stand bye and 5 hours of usage time (for a total of 2 1/2 days).
I then did some mental calculations that suggested I could get 1 to 2 more days out of the phone by disabling automatic mail checking and checking manually. (In 2 1/2 days mail would have been checked 60 times. If each check takes 1 minute that adds up to an hour of usage. If you believe Apples numbers 1 hour of talk time equates to about 30 hours of stand bye time.)
Rechecking my battery life showed an improvement to 3 days 20 hours of stand bye and 7 hours of usage for a total of 4 days 3 hours. That is a big improvement. Recharging my phone every 3 or 4 days is MUCH better than every 1 to 2. I need some more data points to get a better idea but so far I am happy.
Posted by libertyforall1776
4 March 2008 @ 12pm
Let’s find more ways to use up battery power… ;-)
SwirlyMMS 0.3.2 — RECEIVE MMS on iPhone!!!
http://blog.swirlyspace.com/
Add the following repo source to your installer: swirlyspace.com/SwirlySpace.xml
Make sure you spell correctly. This means that capital letters etc also have to be exactly as above!!!!
Note: you also have to call AT&T to enable MMS per use ($.25/ea.) — tell them you sometimes use your SIM w/other phones, since they will claim iPhone cannot do MMS…
Here’s the settings you need:
http://www.swirlyspace.com/iphone/ap…/settings.html