Extending the Life of Your iPod Battery's Charge

Your iPod will play longer between battery charges if you take several small steps to save the battery's power.

The iPod classic and older models include a hard drive, and whatever causes the hard drive to spin causes a drain on the battery. iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod touch, and iPhone models use a flash drive, which uses less battery power — but still uses it, nonetheless — when playing content. The iPod touch and iPhone also use power when they are accessing the Internet; running applications; and in the case of the iPhone, making and receiving calls, or using Bluetooth devices. Keeping these activities to a minimum can help you save power and prolong battery life. One particularly power-hungry activity is restarting your iPod touch or iPhone from a power-off condition — it is better to use sleep mode to turn it on and off.

Your iPod also has a cache — a memory chip holding the section of music to play next. An iPod uses the cache not only to eliminate skipping when something jostles the hard drive, but also to conserve power because the drive doesn’t have to spin as much.

If you use the AIFF or WAV formats for importing music into iTunes, don’t use these formats with your iPod or iPhone. These formats take up way too much space on the iPod or iPhone and fill up the cache too quickly, causing skips when you play them and using too much battery power because the drive spins more often.

Here are more tips to save power while using your iPod:

• Pause music. Pause playback when you’re not listening to your music. Pausing (stopping) playback is the easiest way to conserve your iPod's battery life.

• Lock the device. Press the Sleep/Wake button on top of the iPod touch or iPhone to immediately put it to sleep and lock its controls to save battery power. You can set your iPod touch or iPhone to automatically go to sleep by choosing Settings→General→Auto-Lock from the Home menu, and choosing 1 Minute, 2 Minutes, 3 Minutes, 4 Minutes, or 5 Minutes (or Never, to prevent automatic sleep).

• Back away from the light. Turn down the brightness on an iPod touch or iPhone by choosing Settings→Brightness and dragging the brightness slider to the left. Use the backlight sparingly in iPod classic and iPod nano models. Select Backlight Timer from the iPod Settings menu to limit backlighting to a number of seconds, or to Off, in the iPod’s Settings menu. (Choose Settings from the main menu.) Don’t use the backlight in daylight if you don’t need it.

• Use Hold (with the iPod classic or iPod nano). Flip the Hold switch on iPod classic and iPod nano models to the locked position (with the orange bar showing) to make sure that controls aren’t accidentally activated. You don’t want your iPod playing music in your pocket and draining the battery when you’re not listening.

• Play continuously. Play songs continuously without using the iPod or iPhone controls. Selecting songs from a menu or using Previous/Rewind and Next/Fast-Forward require more battery power. Not only that, but the hard drive has to spin more often when searching for songs, which takes even more battery power.