How to Save iPhone Battery Life - Part 1

Tired of constantly charging your iPhone? Follow these easy tips to boost your battery life.

As we rely on our smartphones more and more, battery life becomes an increasing concern. While the iPhone isn't a horrible power hog, particularly in terms of standby time, there still are situations where your battery can drain too quickly. If you have trouble making it through the day without charging up, here's what you can do right now to boost your iPhone's battery life:

Disable as many notifications as possible. Notifications were a battery drain with earlier versions of iOS. I usually kept them turned off on test handsets, and saw several days of standby time on a charge even with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled. But iOS 6.1 has a completely different notification system, with an Android-style pull-down bar at the top that collects multiple notifications and organizes them.

In the process of adding this, Apple removed the global notification toggle in the Settings menu, so you can't just disable them all in one shot anymore. You can, however, disable app notifications, while leaving important ones (such as text and voicemail) intact. In other words, you can turn it back into an approximation of the original system, which separated call notifications from app notifications automatically.

To do this, head to Settings > Notifications, tap a given category (Phone, Messages, Reminders) or app (Words With Friends, Facebook, etc.), and toggle Notification Center at the top to Off. The fewer notifications you enable, the more standby time you should see. While you're in there, note that you can change the way they appear; you can return a given notification to an alert window in the center of the screen, the way it used to be, instead of with the new bar on top.