Reminder: The iPhone is not your old cellphone!

The biggest thing we see with new iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S users is the fact that they think the iPhone is simply a replacement for their 5-year old Verizon free flip-phone that was gladly given to them as bait to sign up for 2 years of cellular phone service. What they have gotten used to on those old flip phones were days upon days of constant use, never having to charge those flip-phones for days on end. The first rule of owning an iPhone is the following:

• The iPhone is NOT your old flip-phone and will never behave like it!

Once you get this through your head, owning an iPhone will become easier and easier. When you realize that you have basically an entire computer in the palm of your hand, you will understand that having that much power requires much more battery power. Unfortunately, the batteries in these smartphones are not getting any larger--they are either getting smaller or staying the same size while the rest of the phone gets faster and requires more and more battery power to run the functions.

Another thing we see with new iPhone users are complaints of crashing applications. People cannot understand why their old phone never crashed or shut off. What they don't understand is that those old flip-phones didn't run an entire operating system like the iPhone does (and no applications, either!). Just like your computer crashes at times, the iPhone will do the same thing when it's asked to do too much or runs into a badly-behaving application. This is normal behavior at times and simply cannot be avoided! While it's true that Apple does allow application publishers to publish their applications on the "app store," they simply cannot put those applications through every possible scenario on every possible phone, so, applications simply can crash at times. It's usually up to the author of that app to solicit feedback and correct the malfunctioning parts of the app to stop those crashes.

So, the moral of this story is that you have an extremely sophisticated device in your pocket--a device 360 degrees different from any other cellular phone you have used in the past and it simply plays by an entirely set of different rules. Believing the statement that "I paid $200 for this device and it needs to work perfectly..." is a fool's game and you will simply lose if you think that way. What you have to understand instead is that you have a device that will work pretty much all of the time, provided you follow the proper care and feeding of the device. That's the point of this blog--to help you get the very best out of your iPhone or other iDevice, and show you that by altering your current thinking just a small amount, you will be more than happy about your purchase. Trust the words here and at least give what they say an honest try!

iOS Battery Life Tip: Turn off Traffic Reporting

Knowing the local traffic on your town or city network of roads can be great--however, if you live in a small town without major roadways, or, just want to save some iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 battery life, we suggest you turn off this somewhat-useful feature. The way this feature is supposed to work is that it broadcasts your current speed information to the map database, so, if you turn on traffic reporting in your map application, it will currently show where those dreaded traffic slowdowns are. If you don't care about this information, then simply turn off this setting as follows:

iPhone Settings --> Location Services --> Traffic

This should squeeze even more power out of that battery-sucking iPhone 3, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S. Again, with the larger battery of the iPad, this setting may or may not help. If you never leave home with the iPad, simply turn off this feature since it is doing nothing to help your user experience.

iPhone Battery Tip: Turn off the Time Zone

For some reason, the iPhone 4 and 4S seem to want to know what time zone you are in. This is perfectly acceptable, however, it seems to check this setting way too often, which is another battery-drainer. Unless you are moving from time-zone to time-zone, turning off this setting may save you some precious iPhone battery life. This is an easy thing to turn off in your iOS settings:

Go to the iPhone settings area --> Location Services --> System Services (at the bottom)

Turn off the checkbox that says "Setting Time Zone." This one simple step has increased battery life for a lot of users, at a relatively very low cost. If you decide to go to a different time zone, feel free to enable this temporarily. This may not be a deal-breaker on the iPad, due to the increased battery size, but, turning it off on that device is also helpful for increased iOS battery life.