Push email won’t save you much battery life – mine is set for an hour. It’s Apple’s immense stupidity and arrogance in forcing you the iPhone check email EVERY TIME YOU SO MUCH LOOK AT YOUR EMAIL. You can’t turn that off without turning off your phone’s radio to go into Airplane mode. Then every time you want to review emails you get that annoying message about turning on airplane mode.

Let’s get to 3G – turning off all of the above will yield maybe 90 minutes of data usage with NO VOICE. I’ve tried it. After 90 minutes the phone will be down to dangerously low levels. The phone turns off the radio well above the 0% mark. The video/audio player functions more efficiently. The problem is that I didn’t buy this thing to work as an iPod – I bought it to work as a PHONE first. Apple shouldn’t have shaved the battery and handed it to their iPod team to test it.

Last – Telling people not to use the phone as it is expected to be used is absurd. This includes “excessive use of applications.” What does that mean? The phone doesn’t work with REASONABLE use of applications and nobody would be complaining if the phone didn’t work for EXCESSIVE uses. This is more Apple wordplay marketing gobbledygook. It worked better than “Users can expect the iPhone battery to stay charged for significantly longer periods of time by curtailing their talk time and usage of the phone in the entirety.”

Apple made a big booboo here. They will never recall this big mistake. They locked everyone into forcing us to return phones to AppleCare for replacement rather than having the user replace the battery themselves like every other phone. We’ll just have to see whether enough angry people can convince politicians to deal with the mighty Apple that is never wrong.

1) Turn push mail off. Set mail to fetch at 1 hour intervals.
2) Turn WiFi off when not needed.
3) Turn Bluetooth off when not needed.
4) AND… This one is VITALLY IMPORTANT: when you find yourself using GPS, you MUST go into settings and turn Location Services OFF AGAIN! This is a major bug and hopefully Apple fixes it soon. This 4th step is the one that saved me. It meant the different between having my battery drained before lunch – to having it at at about 90% capacity at bedtime!

If you bother to read, it says on the official iPhone 3g website that during battery testing “…all settings were default except: Call Forwarding was turned on; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks was turned off. Wi-Fi was enabled but not associated with a network.”

Wayne Schulz, please do your homework.

The last item did catch me off guard a little (but probably shouldn’t have) and it should probably be mentioned that it also really affects 1st gen devices – those third party apps can be much more processor and memory intensive than the clip-oriented apps Apple gave you. Super Monkey ball eats up battery VERY fast!

The only thing they left out was run it off the charger..