This post is inspired by an Apple fan who wrote a letter to me on Sunday. Her iPhone 5 battery depleted 11% within 7 hours.

I bought an iPhone 5 for my wife recently and from midnight to 7am our battery charge dropped only 1%.

Lithium-ion Batteries

Apple website offers an explanation of the battery life cycle and charging cycle. It’s important you understand how long you should charge your phone (Fast Charge & Trickle Charge) and how long does it take to charge a battery. Basically this applies to most standard lithium-ion battery.

Apple also prepared a dedicated iPhone battery saving tips webpage to help users. You may want to check it out.

It is important to take note from this learning; over time your battery will die. Heavy or light usage it will eventually increase the battery load cycle count.

Base on my experience, your battery will only retain 80% of charge as soon as you hit three hundred above battery load cycle; it probably took you only 6 months to do that.

System & iOS apps on iPhone

The more iOS apps you installed on your iPhone the more power will be drained by the apps features and functions.

Even when you are asleep, your smartphone is working hard for you. Your email clients Yahoo!, Gmail and etc will continue to fetch or push email direct to your iPhone. Your social network apps clients Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many other apps will continue to push notifications as long as your phone or the apps stay alive. All these functions to make your smartphone smart need power and that would also mean draining your battery faster than those who installed less apps on iPhone.

Any system processes on standby mode equally draining your iPhone battery. You may not completely close system processes that needed by iPhone to function properly.

Any iOS apps that perform background syncing will drain battery, for example iCloud, Google Contacts, Microsoft Exchange and many more.

Basic telecommunication hardware

3G, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, iPhone processor and RAM drain battery depend on how you use your iPhone. Some of these hardware drains more battery power than the other.

How I conserve my battery

1. I install iOS app that I use daily and I delete those I don’t use often.
2. I use only one email client; Apple Mail. I delete Gmail, Yahoo! and Sparrow. I believe these apps are power hungry.
3. I delete my Facebook; Facebook is a vampire.
4. While at work; sometime I switch off 3G, 2G is more than enough to push apps notification.
5. At home I turn off my cellular data & 3G.
6. I maintain screen brightness below 50%.
7. Notification: I allow only 6 apps to use this service.
8. Location Service: I allow only 6 apps to use this service.
9. I kill off all the tasks (double click on home button; tap hold the iOS icon then click the minus sign) before I hit the hay.
10. My Bluetooth is always off.

Lastly I use BatteryDoctor app

BatteryDoctor works for me. The app tells me how long I need to charge my battery; it shows me the Fast Charge and Trickle Charge.

The app also includes three cool features: system, to shows iPhone system details; DischargeRank, to shows your power usage; and accelerate, to free up your iPhone RAM.

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I hope you find something useful from my post; of course, you can always share your opinion by commenting below this post if you have something better.