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Poor battery life and iPhone are a few words that get mixed together all too often it seems. While some will say it’s fine, others will say it’s pitiful. As many of you know, battery life will fluctuate greatly between users and their individual usage patterns but TiPb wants to provide you with some simple tips and tricks on conditioning your battery to provide a maximum life and squeezing as much usage out of each charge as possible.

The battery in an iPhone is a lithium-based battery which is most common in consumer portable devices. A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles in its lifetime and the following tips are just a few ways to efficiently gain longer battery lifespans while extending overall battery life of your iPhone.

• Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).
• Avoid heat – do not leave your iPhone in a hot car or in direct sunlight.
• Optimization of your settings. Yes, some of these are no brainers but can be effective. Simple things like:
  1. turning off Location Services,
  2. turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when not in use,
  3. fetching new data less frequently,
  4. setting the brightness of your screen below 50%,
  5. turning of the EQ while listening to music,
  6. turning off 3G while not surfing the internet (Yes, we said it…)

All of these add up to better battery life.

After you’ve tried some of the above tips and you are still not happy or your battery life is just horrid all together, you may want to try restoring your iPhone and do not restore from a backup file but rather restore as a new iPhone. All too often we hear about horrible battery life striking many of you after updating your iPhone to the latest software. If this is the case, 9 times out of 10 a separate restore as a new iPhone will clear up your battery issue.

Have some battery saving tips you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments for others to take advantage of!

The Jailbreak and Unlock wizards behind the iPhone DevTeam are off to DEFCON 17, the security/hacking convention that juxtaposes Black Hat 2009, and have provided a set of tips to help those at the conferences (or anywhere really) avoid getting their iPhone hacked into. The tips are really targeted at Jailbroken iPhones, but some cross over to regular iPhone users as well.

Disable all your login cookies in Safari. If you use the hotel or conference wifi, it is 100% guaranteed that your traffic will be sniffed. If you allow a web site (like twitter.com) to store your login info in a cookie, and if you connect to that site through a normal http connection, your login info will be exposed. At the very least, you’ll end up on the Wall of Sheep. But you’ll be giving up your password to anyone else sniffing too.

They also advise avoiding any public Wi-Fi at hotels, conference centers, airports, etc. (and to tether instead), and either uninstalling or disabling SSH access, or at the very least changing the root and mobile password from Apple’s default.

They also provide their suggestions for talks that might interest the iPhone jailbreak community. If anyone attends, let us know how it goes via our iPhone Jailbreak and Unlock Forum. And If you have more pro tips, send them our way!

If you’re browsing the web on a PC, you can just hit CTRL-F or CMD-F and quickly find any text on a webpage. It’s great for finding things fast, especially on long reams of text, and Safari does a nice job of it — just not Mobile Safari on the iPhone, not yet.

Editor emeritus Mike Overbo brought something very similar to us two years ago (along with a ton of others — check that link!) when iPhone 1.x made bookmarklets all the rage. Since then, Apple has added a lot of functionality, but still hasn’t deigned to gift us with Find… on page. Rafael Cimatti (via App Advice) is keeping the handy Javascript bookmarklet alive via Cydia (though it works on any iPhone). It can’t fully replace a built in command, with next, back, etc. options, etc. but if it isn’t 100% right, it is 100% “right now”.

Here’s the bookmarklet: Find…

Either bookmark it on your desktop browser (drag it to the bookmark bar on desktop Safari) and sync it over, or on your iPhone copy the code after the break, bookmark a random page, edit it, change the name, and paste in the code (check the App Advice link above for step by step instructions).

And next time you’re on a page, hit the bookmark, type in your text, and find away!

Have an iPhone Pro Tip of you own to share? Send it in!

[via Daveizzle]

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