How to increase iPod Touch battery life

Apple claims that the iPod touch gives up to 36 hours of music playback and up to 6 hours of video playback when fully charged. But many users since the 1st gen ipod touch have been complaining of significantly lower battery runtimes.

With such high-tech, power-hungry features and Apps that you're getting on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's no surprise that you don't get the battery life that you'd like to. However, there are a number of simple ways to lengthen the time between charges, as well as prevent the premature need for battery replacement.
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Temperature Matters

Your iPod works best from 32° to 95°F. You should store it in environments of -4° to 113° F. That’s 0° to 35° C and -20° to 45° C for the metrically inclined. Keeping your iPod as near room temperature as possible (72° F or 22° C) is ideal.

If the temperature is higher than 95° F (or 35° C), you may permanently damage your battery’s capacity. You may damage it even more if you charge the device in these temperatures. Even storing a battery in a hot environment can damage it irreversibly.

Cold environment is not good either. Cold environment may decrease the battery life. Unlike the effects of a hot environment, this is a temporary condition. Once molecules in the battery warm up, the battery will return to its previous capacity.

Charging your iPod touch while in certain carrying cases may generate excess heat, which can affect battery capacity. If you notice your iPod gets hot when you charge it, take it out of its case first.

Turn off Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi consumes power even if you are not using its features to connect to a network. You can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi.

Switch Off Backlight and Equalizer (EQ)

Your iPod’s backlighting and equalizer features all consume power. Setting the backlight to “always on” will significantly reduce your battery life. Adding EQs to playback uses more of your iPod processor, since they aren’t encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don’t use it. If, however, you’ve added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ to “flat” in order to have the effect of “off,” because iPod keeps your iTunes settings intact.

Minimize use of third-party applications

Excessive use of applications on iPod touch, such as games that prevent the screen from dimming or shutting off, can reduce battery life.

Fetch new data less frequently

Applications on iPod touch such as Mail can be set to fetch data wirelessly at specific intervals. The more frequently email or other data is fetched, the quicker your battery may drain. To fetch new data manually, from the Home screen choose Settings > Fetch New Data and tap Manually. To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings > Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. Note that this is a global setting and applies to all applications that do not support push services.

Turn off push mail

If you have a push mail account on iPod touch such as Yahoo!, MobileMe or Microsoft Exchange, turn off push mail when you don’t need it. Go to Settings > Fetch New Data and set Push to Off. Messages sent to your push email accounts will now be received on your iPod touch based on the global Fetch setting rather than as they arrive.

Minimize Fast Forward

iPod plays music out of a solid-state memory cache to provide skip-free playback and maximize battery life. If you fast forward through your playlist, iPod will need to fill its cache more frequently, thus accessing the hard drive more often and using more power. This will decrease overall battery life. By creating great playlists in iTunes that cater to your personal taste, you can decrease your need to fast forward. Using the shuffle feature may also help to minimize your use of the fast forward feature.

Use Compressed Songs

iPod’s cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes (less than 9 MB). If your audio files are large or uncompressed (including AIFF or WAV format), you may want to compress them, or use a different compression method, such as AAC or MP3, when importing them into iTunes.

Posted in: Apple-iPod-Touch-Tips-Tricks