How to Avoid iOS Battery Drain

My pal Greg Scown passed this along. Written by a former Apple Genius:

During this testing, Facebook kept jumping up on the process list even though I wasn't using it. So I tried disabling Location Services  and Background App Refresh  for Facebook, and you'll never guess what happened: my battery percentage increased. It jumped from 12% to 17%. Crazy. I've never seen that happen before on an iPhone. The iPod touch exhibits this behavior, to my memory, although I haven't tested it in a while. For the iPhone, the battery percentage is usually pretty consistent.

I have confirmed this behavior on multiple iPhones with the same result: percentage points actually increase after disabling these background functions of Facebook.

Bad, Facebook, bad.

Various things on the list I knew, but I definitely learned a lot reading this.

"Goodbye Circus Circus"

Here's a rundown on where things are at in the lead-up to WWDC for iOS 7 according to All Things D. The de-skeumorphication of iOS is something I heartily welcome if it cleans up the interface and (possibly) improves performance by reducing the unnecessary animation, graphics, and other things that make my iPhone drain battery like there's no tomorrow.

THX Tune-up for iOS is free until next week

Grab this while it's free.

THX's new app costs $2 starting next week, and is made to turn your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch into a home theater calibration device.

What's the upside to this over the THX calibrator on various DVDs and Blu-rays? You can use the phone/tablet's camera to do color and tint calibration instead of shelling out for blue filter glasses (which aren't cheap or easy to come by).

You can calibrate video via AirPlay and an AppleTV, but to do sound you'll need Apple's iPhone/iPad to HDMI adapter: Lightning connector version, 30-pin version.