No doubt about it, issues with battery life remain a hot topic for iPhone 3.0 and iPhone 3GS users.

Now, if your battery drain is caused simply by use — you never put the iPhone (or iPod touch) down and are always playing games, pushing IMs, watching movies, etc. your only choice is to get a few more charging cables or battery extenders. If, however, you’re doing roughly the same things you’ve always done and getting substantially less battery life for your troubles, there’s a chance a few troubleshooting steps might just help get your power problems back under control.

Reboot iPhone

If, all of a sudden, your iPhone starts burning through battery and getting hot at the same time, there could be a “rogue process” just churning away in the background. The answer to that is a good old-fashioned power cycle.

Hold down the sleep button until the red “Slide to power off” arrow appears. If your iPhone is frozen or otherwise in dire straights, you can hold down the home button at the same time as the sleep button to force quit all applications and bring up the red arrow. Then just swipe, let the iPhone turn off, wait a few seconds, and hold down the sleep button again to turn your iPhone back on.

Redo Push

Since iPhone 2.0 we’ve seen Push gone wrong really cause a hit to battery life. With 3.0, Push Notification means not only could mail, calendar, and contacts start misbehaving in the background, but your IM, Twitter, games, and all sorts of other apps can as well.

Apple says Push can cause a 20% drop in battery life, but if you think yours is worse then it should be, the next step is to redo anything that involves Push, including MobileMe and Exchange accounts, and apps using Push Notification. Now, you might want to try doing one at a time, check your battery life, and if you don’t notice any improvement, try the next one. If you find the culprit quickly, that approach could save you some time. If you just want to get it over with, you might want to do them all at once.

For the accounts, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose your MobileMe and/or Exchange accounts, scroll down to the bottom and hit delete. For apps, go to Settings > Notifications and look at the list of any apps using Push Notification. Go back to the Home Screen, hold down the home button until the icons start to jiggle, and delete the Push Notification app.

Then, for accounts, go back to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, hit Add Account…, choose Mobile Me and/or Exchange, and re-enter your settings. For Push Notification apps, either sync them back from iTunes or go to the App Store app and re-download them.

Restore as New iPhone

We won’t lie to you — this is the nuclear option. It’s scorched earth. But to be frank, we at TiPb almost always default to this step because it almost always “just works”. We do this every time we get a new firmware and every time we notice something just isn’t right, and we have excellent battery life to prove it.

To restore your iPhone as new and get a fresh, clean start, attach it to your Windows or Mac via the USB cable and launch iTunes. A Restore button should be front and center on the screen. Hit it, then wait as iTunes goes through the laborious process of wiping your iPhone and installing the firmware again from scratch.

IMPORTANT: When iTunes asks if you want to restore your data from backup or set up as a new iPhone, choose NEW iPHONE.

Yes, you will lose your settings and any data saved in apps that don’t provide some sort of sync functionality, but it’s possible (even likely) some corruption in those settings or data is contributing to your poor battery life, and with an appliance like the iPhone, this is the only way to get rid of it.

This will also kill your Jailbreak, if you’re jailbroken. But if something in your Jailbreak was killing your battery life, like backgrounder gone awry, trying out your iPhone without the Jailbreak is a good way to establish that.

Once your iPhone is set up as new, you can sync your info and media back over using the iTunes tabs as normal, and/or setup accounts and download apps on the iPhone itself.

Conclusion

iPhone 3.0 and iPhone 3GS should have roughly the same battery life for you as iPhone 2.2.1 and the iPhone 3G. If you’re getting something substantially less than that, there could be something wrong with your iPhone 3.0 install or your iPhone 3GS’ system.

Rebooting the iPhone, redoing Push-enabled applications, and restoring your iPhone as new are three escalating steps you can try to fix your battery problems.

Let us know how they work for you.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How To: Troubleshoot iPhone 3.0 Battery Life Problems

It wasn’t long until I realized that my iPhone was heating up excessively and I couldn’t keep it close enough to a charger. If my phone was topped off when I went to bed, and left unplugged, it was dead by morning. How could this be? Even a reset didn’t help. There had to be some app running in the background that was chewing up my battery faster than Pac-man on a steroid/speed cocktail. Are YOU having the same problem since the 2.2 update? If so, read on. This tip may apply to you!

Does this picture look familiar? It’s what I was looking at after only mere hours off the charger. The only thing I could think of was that an app was running in the background, draining my battery even when my iPhone was only in standby and unused.

I closed any apps that could be the culprit – I logged off of my IM app. Since the 2.2 update, I had changed nothing, so I assumed the update made some kind of change that resulted in something on my iPhone being ‘always on’ and, likely, using data at a voracious rate. I reset my Safari to make sure it wasn’t the culprit. What could it be?

The only other app on my phone to use data was Mail. I have Exchange set up on my iPhone so that I can get my company mail, contacts, and appointments in as close to ‘real-time’ as possible. Could the update somehow have affected my Exchange settings and made everything wonky? It was time to experiment.

One thing I’ve learned through painful experience is that, in most cases, a problem can be fixed by starting with the simple things. I’ve learned this when diagnosing car problems. If the car doesn’t start, why? Does it turn over when you turn the ignition? Nothing at all? Could be the alternator, right? Oh wait! What about the battery? It’s a lot cheaper to check the battery and replace it before digging under the hood and replacing an alternator.

With this start-with-simple approach, I deleted my Exchange email account and then set it up again from scratch. Guess what? It worked. For some reason, the update did not play nice with existing Exchange settings and email. Once the update ran, my Exchange was locked into a constant ‘on’ state and was endlessly searching for mail that wasn’t there, rather than waiting for the mail to be ‘pushed’. No wonder my iPhone was like carrying a hot coal in my pocket! A simple deletion and setup of my Exchange mail account resolved the problem and my battery life has been normal ever since.

If you use Exchange on your iPhone, I recommend deleting and reinstalling your mail account after all future iPhone updates. Then, you’ll avoid the distress I went through when I couldn’t get 5 hours out of my iPhone after a full charge.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Tips and How To’s: Post-2.2 Battery Woes

How is your battery life doing after upgrading to firmware 2.1? Hopefully better than mine!

I thought everything was going great after I updated Friday morning. Well I had a full charge late in the afternoon and left for work. A half hour later I noticed my iPhone was a bit warm without even using it. I Looked at my battery life and I was at 50% or so! Safe to say the phone was dead not long after.

So after a full night on the charger last night I thought everything should be good today. Well I was wrong. 2 hours of standby and a 5 minute phone call later, and my iPhone looked like the above picture. Actually that is exactly how it looked! What has really got me stumped is that I checked the usage meter and it said I used 1 hour and 56 minutes! A 5 minute phone call turned into that somehow? The time since last full charge was at 2 hours, which was correct.

I did a full restore without using a back up file after this, charged my phone and while the battery did seem to last longer, the battery meter is way off still. The “force quit” did not work, nor did any soft resets.

There is a thread over at Macrumors and Apple Discussions showing others are having this exact same issue, so that leads me to believe that my iPhone is not the issue but rather a issue with the 2.1 firmware in combination with something else? MobileMe possibly?

Turning off Push… my usage meter goes back to normal. Now I’m turning push on for mail only. We’ll see if it messes it up again.

If anyone has had issues like this please chime in.

UPDATE: I am happy to report that ever since I shut off push for contacts and calendars my iPhone is now working like it should. Just woke up and checked the phone, I almost have a full charge and it says I have used 1 hour and 16 minutes and time since last full charge is 10 hours. Which is correct. So it is a issue with mobileme push for sure. Whether it is getting stuck or whatever, if you are having battery issues and use mobileme or exchange try turning off push completely. Then, if it is the issue, slowly turn back on the email push feature and test it out. Then contacts and calendars…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Updated: iPhone 2.1 Firmware Causing Battery Drain? Is Push to Blame?