How to increase your iPhone battery life – a few tips.

Well like everyone out there I want my iPhone battery to last forever – i unfortunately upgraded to firmware 3.1.3 and while I dont need a baseband unlock because my phone isn’t locked, I did want a jailbreak. All this aside, I found that as soon as I had upgraded, my battery life was a quarter worse than before.

I used to get pretty much 2 days use out of a full charge – I dont use the phone loads, just normal texting, a few phone calls and a bit of facebook / twittering, but after the 3.1.3 firmware upgrade, I immediately found I was getting only a days worth of battery life

Wasn’t happy especially as apple stopped me from downgrading to 3.1.2 which was nice and lovely.

So to help me get the best of what I had I made 2 changes which made a big difference and have resulted in me getting my 2 days usage back, and maybe even a bit more.

1: Disable location services – Go into settings > general, and change location services to off.

This does mean you no longer have your GPS active, but if you like me only use this infrequently, i’d rather switch it on in the odd occasion I do use it, than have it sucking my battery away.

2: Disable wi-fi scanning – Go into settings > wi-fi and change Ask to Join Networks to off. This means that rather than constantly scanning for available wi-fi networks, it will only use the ones you have pre-configured. Should you want to connect to a new network, you can either switch this back on or go back into settings > wi-fi and pick it from the list or add it manually. Again this saves loads of battery time as the wi-fi is not scanning.

These 2 simple tips made a big difference to mine and a few friends iPhone life, hope it helps you too.

Hyperterminal / command line modem calls

Not something you use much these days, but something I thought i’d note down here in case someone at some point needs it.

ATA (ata) Handshake sounds if modem speaker is enabled. Modem tries to answer call with handshake sounds. Press Enter to stop this process. The no carrier message is normal with this command. This command does not apply to Windows XP.

ATDT <ISP Phone Number>

For example, ATDT1234567 (where 1234567 is the connection number to dial for Internet service).

To connect to a test server in the US you can type:

ATDT18666633665 Login: _ Connects to a test server. If you can get to a login, your modem is working correctly.

ATDT (atdt) Dialtone if modem speaker is enabled. Indicates that the modem can get a dial tone. The message “no dial tone” indicates that either the modem or phone line is not working correctly. Press Enter to stop this process.

AT&F OK Resets most modems to factory defaults.

ATI0 (ati) 56000 ok The response varies between modems, but returns the modem speed..

ATI3 (ati) <Version and name> Returns the modem product type and firmware version.

ATZ (atz) ok This command resets the modem.

ATH (ath) ok Hangs up modem

ATS0=2 (ats0=2)

Zero, not the letter O . ok This command sets the modem to receive. Call the computer’s phone number and you should hear the handshake signal. Ring, ring displays on HyperTerminal screen, followed by no carrier , when the caller hangs up.

Checkpoint fw monitor to debug and trace traffic.

tcpdump is good, but for checkpoints to find out exactly what is happening to your traffic fw monitor is the way to go.

its usage is as follows to live debug traffic according to your filter:

# fw monitor -e “accept src=10.0.0.x;”

This will output in realtime the traffic going into your firewall from ip address 10.0.0.x

You will see output similar to the below:

Lan1:i[84]: 10.0.0.1 ->192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———– This shows traffic coming into interface Lan1 but before rules have been processed thats the lowercase i.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan1:I[84]: 10.0.0.1 -> 192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <——— This shows traffic still on interface Lan1 but after rules have been processed hence the uppercase I, if firewalls were dropping this packet you would not see this.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan5:o[84]: 10.0.0.1 -> 192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———-Now we see traffic going out of the destination interface Lan5 but again before the rules have been processed – lowercase o.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan5:O[84]: 10.0.0.1 ->192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———-Finally we see traffic going out of the destination interface Lan 5 after successfully traversing the rules – uppercase O

There is a load of filters you can apply, the example above uses src, but you can also use keywords such as dst, sport, dport etc..

Check this doc for a full list of what you can and can’t do..

http://www.checkpoint.com/techsupport/downloads/html/ethereal/fw_monitor_rev1_01.pdf