Many people use their iPads for, well, everything: checking emails, making presentations, watching videos, reading books, even chatting with friends. It’s a one-stop productivity and entertainment center. That’s great—until the battery runs out right in the middle of the day! Here are some tips on prolonging your iPad’s battery life.
Keep your iPad in a cool place
Never ever leave your iPad in your car. Temperatures can soar when the car’s left in the sun, and this heat will ‘fry’ the battery and affect its ability to hold a charge. You’ll notice getting less battery life per charge, and eventually, you may have to get the battery replaced altogether. (That’s why the user manual says: store in a cool and dry place. Assuming you read it, which we never do.)
Adjust the screen brightness
Keep it bright enough for you to read, and no more. This will save you a lot of battery life and reduce glare, which can cause eye fatigue. Just go to settings, and you’ll see the ‘Brightness & Wallpaper’ function.
Automate the screen lock
Doesn’t take a tech geek to know that you need to turn off the iPad when you’re not using it! But just in case you tend to forget, you can adjust the Auto-Lock feature (also in Settings) so that it will turn off when you had to take a call that lasted longer than you expected, or any of those little emergencies.
Switch to Airplane Mode
You don’t need WiFi if you’re playing Plants Versus Zombies or Temple Run, or reading a book you’ve downloaded. To preserve battery, switch your iPad to Airplane Mod. This conserves battery and prevents those irritating interruptions, like the bleeps and notificaitons from your email. This is particularly important if you’re in an area with really crappy connection, because your iPad will keep attempting to connect—using up energy.
Avoid using 3G
3G uses up more battery than WiFi, so you do the Math.
Lower frequency checks
Your iPad or even iPhone can be configured to update email, calendar and account information. But seriously, you don’t need updates all the time, so reprogram your device so that it doesn’t automatically perform those functions.
Disable some functions
For example, push notifications. Let’s face it: if we wanted to find out what our Facebook or Twitter friends were doing, we’d access the site. So turn off all those reminders (‘You’ve got 3 messages!’), which also adds on work to your iPad.
Other useless functions are location services, bluetooth, vibrate, even sounds.
Charge and discharge
Every month do a full charge and a full discharge, which can keep your battery working at full capacity. And avoid leaving your battery at ‘zero’ for a long time. On the rare occasions that you won’t be using your iPad for several days, make sure there’s still some juice left in the battery.
Photo from smallbiztrends.com
Leave a Reply