I should tell others about this idea. Oh, wait.
When David Carnoy, an executive editor over at CNET, asked an official Apple Genius for help with his iPhone’s battery life, I don’t think he was prepared for their answer: turn it off to save your battery.
I’m not making this up.
Apparently, the official Apple Store technicians (referred to as Geniuses) say that leaving the phone on for too long results in poor battery life. Now, I understand that with multitasking and complicated background applications, it’s not unusual to need to reboot from time to time for peak performance. Sometimes, poorly coded apps fail to exit properly, leaving memory leaks and possibly background tasks running. This is true of any complex OS and has been a regular practice for smartphone users of yesteryear. But that’s not what Mr. Carnoy was being told. He was actually being told to turn it off and leave it off for periods at a time, because the phone gets “stressed” being on all the time.
Apparently your life can be so hectic, that even your phone needs some downtime. Because phones are people too.
After Mr. Conroy pointed out that he would be unable to make or receive phone calls at night if it was off, the Genius responded that because he’s not a doctor on call, there’s no reason to need it on all night.
What about using the phone as an alarm clock? The Genius asked why he intended to use a $400 device as an alarm when “you can get a perfectly good alarm clock for $20 these days.”
You just can’t make this stuff up. Check out his article for a transcript of the entire hilariously pretentious conversation (but not rude at all, according to Mr. Carnoy) here.
Being an iPhone owner, I haven’t encountered a significant (if any) difference in idle battery drain over time, if there’s something good about iOS is it’s robustness, stability and wrapping up. There are ways to significantly increase battery life while not using the phone (during night, etc.), just by disabling 3G, data connection and WiFi boosts battery life enormously, in fact, unless I’m away from a WiFi hotspot and I don’t intend to access the Internet, I leave 3G off, that, appart from increasing battery life, efectively boosts signal in unfriendly places like indoors or poorly covered areas (too few anntenas).
Also, since multitasking was introduced, it’s important to note that many apps are not closed when you hit the home button, the just keep running in the background, manually closing them when you’re not going to use the anymore in a while also helps (and frees up RAM).