5 Ways to Stop iOS7 from Draining Your Battery

You've updated your phone to iOS7, and you're enjoying all the new bells and whistles. But you've noticed that your battery seems to be draining faster than a dog can inhale an unguarded steak. That's because of things iOS7 is doing in the background, some of which you probably don't need. Here are five tips from Mashable on ways to conserve your battery charge.

Parallax

Parallax is a new feature that animates some things and can even make it seem like the background wallpaper is moving. Not only does that give some people motion sickness, it's a battery hog and totally unnecessary. Unless you just really like the coolness factor, turn it off. Here's how:

Settings > General > Accessibility > click Reduce Motion to "on."

Spotlight

With iOS7, you can access Spotlight (you probably think of it as "search") from any screen just by swiping down. But it's constantly indexing things behind the scenes, chomping away at your battery the whole time. The good news is that you can turn it off for particular apps without shutting it down completely. Here's how to do it:

Settings > General > Spotlight Search > disable what you don't need

Location tracking

Some people find location tracking to be so creepy they turn it off completely. There are some good uses for it - like mapping, navigation, and weather - but you really don't need Twitter to know where you are at all times. This is how to turn it off by app:

Settings > Privacy > Location Services

If you want to drill down even more, scroll to the bottom of the Location Services screen and choose System Services. You may be surprised at some of the things that are draining your battery - location-based iAds, for example. Turn off any you don't need.

Automatic updates

You may have noticed that, since you updated to iOS7, you're not seeing notices that updates are available for your apps. That's because iOS7 just takes care of it automatically. That falls into the "nice, but not necessary" category, especially when your phone is almost dead anyway. Here's how you can turn it off:

Settings > iTunes and Apple Store > uncheck the Updates option.

Unfortunately, this is all-or-nothing; you can't turn it off just for specific apps. But there aren't many apps for which instant updates are crucial.

Background app refresh

This is another nice-but-not-necessary feature. Most of us can wait the couple of seconds it takes Facebook to refresh when we open it. If not, you can turn it off by app. Just follow these steps:

Settings>General>Background App Refresh

Gizmodo also offers some general tips on preserving battery life:

• Try not to have big swings in charge level every day. Keep it as constant as you realistically can.
• Don't let the charge get too low. The optimal charge is between 40 and 80 percent.
• Don't let your phone get too hot; heat kills battery life.

With all that extra battery life, why not try out some new apps? In addition to getting an instant price for your items, you can simply scan barcodes to enter them. New apps come out every day that offer cool features for making life easier.

There are a lot of brilliant new features in iOS7. But there are some you don't need, and some you only need occasionally. If you've been having too much day left at the end of your battery life, try turning off some of the "fun" features so you can rely on your phone to do what you need it to do.