mark o'brien

I love my iPhone, but there are a couple of things that I’m looking forward to them fixing along the way. One of those things is the power management. I am a fairly heavy user of my phone, so I sort of expect it to get through the battery a bit, but the iPhone seems particularly poor in this regard.

I could go on about this but won’t bore you with my frustration, other than to say that the other day I suddenly noticed that my battery seemed to be dying right before my eyes. It was just draining away within a few hours, and the phone was really hot to touch. I mean really hot. It was weird. I also discovered after the fact that it was doing a bunch of serious download/upload activity too, but this wasn’t obvious to me at the time, except for the temperature issue which made me suspect something was going on in the background.

I tried all kinds of things. I searched the net high and low for solutions and options. In the end, I figured out what it was and what to do about it.

Some sites talked about turning off push email, along with just about every feature on the phone that might use power. This seemed to me to be a stupid way to go. What’s the point having an iPhone if you basically have to turn it into an old Nokia 5110 to save power?! So, I discounted these answers as being a bit goofy.

So, what is the problem here?

Turns out that there is some sort of bug with the iPhone Exchange setup. Not exactly sure what, but there are lots of articles on the web that pose all sorts of possibilities. Many point to the calendar syncing as perhaps being the prime problem. Either way, my setup was working just fine until this past weekend when the battery drain kicked in and something was obviously wrong. I have no idea what caused this to suddenly happen, but it was clearly not working right.

All the sites around suggested that the fix was to delete your Exchange account on the phone and reinstall it again after rebooting the phone.

I balked at this because it sounded like a pretty hardball solution. But, in the end, driven by frustration, I did exactly this and discovered two things… firstly, it wasn’t as big a hassle as I thought it would be. The deletion/reinstall process was pretty painless, so it’s not a big thing. One of the beauties of an Exchange account, I guess. The phone just sucks up all the data again and off you go.

Second thing I discovered was that this fixed the problem. Boom. Done. All good. For now…

If you’re suddenly having battery drain on your iPhone in a way which is beyond the normal drain, your phone is hot, and something is just not right, and if you are using your iPhone to hook into an Exchange server, then I will put money on it that this solution will fix it.

Your biggest issue is making sure you know all the account settings for reinstalling your Exchange account, but after that it’s a pretty quick fix.

Enjoy!

UPDATE – After a couple of days, I am SHOCKED at how much better my battery life is after nixing and reinstalling my Exchange account. Wow! Should have done it waaaay sooner.