I really like iOS4 – It gives me a lot features I use every single day (Every hour to be quite honest).
But there’s one major downside to iOS 4: It’s batterylife.

The iPhone’s battery life never really was very good – Therefore I bought a Morphie Juice Pack Air last year, but with iOS4 on the iPhone 3GS the battery drain is significantly more than iPhone OS 3.1.2. Eventhough Johan already posted a nice post with a few tips how to keep your battery drain at a low level, I thought it would be good to share this tip as well.

I think the battery drain mainly is because of the new multitasking feature in iOS 4. Multitasking lets you quickly switch from one app to another, and return to the first app and go on where you left with the first application. But with heavy applications like Navigon or TomTom (which use a lot of battery anyway) it’s sometimes not good to have them running in the background all the time. With these applications, when I reach my destination I’d like to completely close the application and start it whenever I need it again.

Walk-through

Now there’s a solution to that – and the solution is directly in iOS4, but a lot of people don’t know about it.
When double-clicking the home-tab you’ll get a list of all ‘open’ applications. This list can become very long.

Now tab-and-hold with your finger on an application in the multitasking list.

You’ll get to see a close button on every single application. Pushing the close-button closes the application and removes it from the multitasking list. This can be done with every application in the list. In the example above I closed NAVIGON, becasue It took to many resources and I didn’t need to get directions anymore. So after pushing the close-button on the Navigon tab – all the other applications move to the left and the blank spot is filled with an other open application (In this case WunderRadio)

Update from comment Johan: When scrolling your finger to the left, You’ll get to see the next 4 ‘open’ applications. In this way you can more specifically select which application you want to close.

By repeating this on all the other open applications it is possible to completely get the list Empty so that no application is open anymore (And therefore doesn’t take any system resources)

Return to the default home-screen just like you’re used to do by pushing the Home-button once.

Concluding Thoughts

In my opinion this is the best way to get more out of the battery-life during the day on the iPhone (3GS). By closing an application in stead of just hitting the Home-button I honestly can say that the battery drain of my iPhone 3GS is significantly less than just leave the app ‘open’ in the background.
If you think your iPhone’s battery drains more after the iOS 4 update, I’d recommend this procedure and hope your battery drain problem is solved as well.

The post iOS 4 – Close an app (and prevent battery drain) appeared first on Johan van Mierlo's MobilityMinded.