iPod Touch Battery Life Tricks?

radeon962

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 13, 2008
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Anyone have any good ways to stretch the battery life on an iPod Touch (2g version)? My kids love playing games on it which drains the battery fairly quick and then it always needs to recharge when I need to use it for my HTPC.
 
I usually dim the display first, and make sure at you have Auto Brightness turned off. After that, disable Push notifications and Location Services. If you have any mail accounts set up on it, set them to check manually. On older devices like your iPod, I've also found that disabling Spotlight Search can also help a bit. Hope that helps! If I think of anything else, I'll post.
 
The only other thing I can think of to add to that is to turn off the wifi if your not using it. This, and what lithiumrage posted is what I do to extend the battery life of my iPhone. I really wish they would come out with a quick switch button for all these settings though. I really like on the iPad how you can change your brightness on the fly and was terribly disappointed to not see especially this feature on my iPhone.
 
I bought an external battery from Hypermac (the 7200mAh one) for mine. I got the clearance non-ipad one for $50 instead of the $100.

I got it because of an international flight I just went on.
 
Has anyone tried to replace a 2g iPod Touch battery? Mine is showing signs of degraded performance, but I don't get rid of it as the wife had it etched as a gift from my first son, and then unborn second son.
 
ya. definitely turn off the wifi, ipod's new software leave wifi on all the time, if you let it. so it drains a LOT of battery, mine dies in 2 days if I leave wifi on but dont even use it. If I remember to turn on airplane mode(wifi off), It can hold battery for 2 weeks.
 
Turn off Bluetooth if & when you don't need it for your HTPC or your kids' games. Turn off the notification service if you don't need it (entirely -- not just on a per-app-basis). That is what usually keeps people's iPod touch connected to wifi. If there are any mail accounts on it, make sure fetch/push is set appropriately. In other words, if you have a mail account set up on it but don't need it to get mail in the background, then set push and fetch off.

Which version of the OS is on it? 4.0.x is really, really slow and battery hoggy, and should be upgraded to 4.2.1 ASAP if you're not dependent on an older version for a jailbreak.

In general, the batteries in these devices do best if you stick with topping up the battery (90% -> full -> 80% -> full -> 95% -> full, etc) instead of draining it to completely dead every time before recharging. Only do that once a month in order to recalibrate the battery measurement (full -> dead -> full). Rapid full discharge and recharge will degrade the battery performance faster. Sadly, there's no way to repair this degradation, only stave it off.

If you don't mind adding thickness to it, using battery pack cases is a handy way to supplant the meager internal battery. I recommend the Mophie Juice Pack Air. I used one religiously with my iPhone 3GS. Their iPod touch 2nd gen model will roughly double the life between charges, and if it's anything like the iPhone 3G/3GS model of Juice Pack Air, then it will charge both and sync via the USB cable that comes with the battery, so you will never have to remove it unless you need to attach something to the dock port (for instance, an IR device, if that's how you use your HTPC). Here's the link to the Mophie battery: http://www.mophie.com/product-p/1110_jpa-t2-gry.htm

When the time comes that the battery just doesn't hold enough juice for half a shit anymore, then you can either replace the iPod, or replace the battery. If you're good with solder, there's replacement internal batteries out there for pretty cheap. iFixit, who has historically done teardowns on shiny new gadgets to figure out how to fix them, sells one for $15, comes with the opening tools, and they have a good guide on doing the replacement itself. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-iPod-Touch-2nd-Generation-Battery-Replacement/1131/1
 
Has anyone tried to replace a 2g iPod Touch battery? Mine is showing signs of degraded performance, but I don't get rid of it as the wife had it etched as a gift from my first son, and then unborn second son.

there are places that will do it for about 20$

http://www.ipodjuice.com/ is the one im thinking about sending my first gen ipod touch

and as for optimizing what you have turn down the backlight as far as you can stand it and turn off any extra radios like bluetooth and wifi if your not using it turn off push notifications and anything else that keeps it from sleeping...
 
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