If you own an iPhone 3G as I have for several months, then you’re probably used to a daily battery charging routine. Here are some tips to extend your battery life.
If you own an iPhone 3G as I have for several months, then you’re probably used to a daily battery charging routine. I usually charge my iPhone every morning and sometimes again during the day.
I also travel a lot and like to listen to music while flying, so I often get off the plane with a dead iPhone battery and can’t check email or find where I’m at using Google Maps/GPS.
That all has changed after receiving a treasured Father’s Day gift from my son, that’s tripled the amount of time I can use my iPhone in between charges.
Sure, Apple provides several tips for conserving power and extending iPhone battery life, but they all follow a similar approach that basically involves NOT using important features like Wi-Fi, 3G wireless network speed, GPS location services, etc.
Basically all the features that drew me to the iPhone in the first place, and convinced me to trade in my Blackberry for one, are the ones Apple recommends I stop using in order to extend battery life. No thanks – I’m not about to turn them all off just to add a few minutes to an already short battery life. I would have stuck with my Blackberry if that was the end of the story. Fortunately it wasn’t.
The gift I received from my son was a Tekkeon MP1800
Combining the battery conservation tips from Apple with the additional charges from my new Tekkeon battery backup device effectively triples the amount of time I can go between charging up.
The Tekkeon is about 3 inches short and fits easily in the palm of my hand, and slides nicely into one of my laptop pockets. It even has a built-in LED flash light which is handy for those dark flights where I can’t find things in my laptop bag.
The Tekkeon takes a while to charge – about 8 hours – but that’s about the same amount of time it would take to charge my iPhone 2 1/2 times. It comes with adapters for all the major cell phones and smart phones (Blackberry, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, LG, etc) and also includes a standard USB port for any device that includes a USB charging cable (Zune, iPod, iTouch, etc).
I was also surprised to find that the wall charger was not included with the Tekkeon. It comes with a USB adapter, but the wall charger is sold separately. That wasn’t a problem though, because iPhones come with wall chargers and the Tekkeon’s USB adapter plugs right into it.
I actually just bought the new iPhone 3GS today, and Apple claims it’s battery life is much longer (although after using it during a 2 1/2 hour flight to Southern California I can say it hasn’t seemed to last much longer then the old 3G would have).
It won’t matter either way now that I have the Tekkeon. I’m looking forward to sailing past the electrical outlets and still having plenty of power to enjoy all the iPhone 3GS’ new features.