brave [little] meme

For the past few days I have been struggling with my iPhone 3GS’s battery draining at what seemed an unusually high rate. By mid-day, only four hours after unplugging it from its overnight charge, the iPhone was already approaching 50% with minimal use.

Enabling the battery percentage meter (Settings > General > Usage) highlighted the problem further: the iPhone seemed to be draining rapidly even on standby.

Trawling the interwebs brought about this solution: turn off Push for any Exchange email accounts you may have. I have an Exchange email account enabled for Calendars, and sometimes email. Switching it to hourly Fetch has left my iPhone’s battery at 61% after 6.5 hours of reasonable use, including playing some pretty GPU-intensive 3D Games (F.A.S.T), repeatedly using the camera, and spending some time painting in Brushes. All in all, a serious improvement over yesterday’s pitiful performance.

Rumors of a possible iPhone OS 3.0 bug related to this feature abound, so we’ll have to see if Apple addresses the issue with the next bugfix release. Give it a try if this applies to you. Your mileage may vary.