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Push or frequently checked email can slurp iPhone battery
If your iPhone is exhibiting inordinately short battery life and you're not sure why, check your Mail settings.
First, if you're using a Yahoo! account, navigate to Settings > Mail then select your Yahoo! account and choose "Advanced." Check the "Use Push Mail" setting. If push mail -- which allows the iPhone to notify you of new mail as soon as it hits your inbox -- is enabled, it can put a serious hurt on your battery life.
For other email accounts, reducing the email check interval to every hour (In Settings, choose Mail then tap Auto-Check) or Manual has significantly increased battery life. If you are going to use a short mail-checking interval, tap the Sounds pane of Settings and turn the option for New Mail off.
For more battery saving tips, see our special report.
Only a few days ago I decided to see what my battery life was, and how I might improve it. With email checking two accounts every hour and my normal mix of calls, music, and internet I got 2 days 7 hours of stand bye and 5 hours of usage time (for a total of 2 1/2 days).
I then did some mental calculations that suggested I could get 1 to 2 more days out of the phone by disabling automatic mail checking and checking manually. (In 2 1/2 days mail would have been checked 60 times. If each check takes 1 minute that adds up to an hour of usage. If you believe Apples numbers 1 hour of talk time equates to about 30 hours of stand bye time.)
Rechecking my battery life showed an improvement to 3 days 20 hours of stand bye and 7 hours of usage for a total of 4 days 3 hours. That is a big improvement. Recharging my phone every 3 or 4 days is MUCH better than every 1 to 2. I need some more data points to get a better idea but so far I am happy.
SwirlyMMS 0.3.2 -- RECEIVE MMS on iPhone!!!
http://blog.swirlyspace.com/
Add the following repo source to your installer: swirlyspace.com/SwirlySpace.xml
Make sure you spell correctly. This means that capital letters etc also have to be exactly as above!!!!
Note: you also have to call AT&T to enable MMS per use ($.25/ea.) -- tell them you sometimes use your SIM w/other phones, since they will claim iPhone cannot do MMS...
Here's the settings you need:
http://www.swirlyspace.com/iphone/ap.../settings.html