Recently I've observed that my battery life seems to be depleting fast and I realized its coincides with when I start testing and using the skitter beta.

I knew this was happening but I just realized today how much it took. I spent 14 minutes today and learnt 48 new words (yay me!) and it took out 20% of my batter life!

Any body else experiencing this? Am wondering what the rates like in the background - it can't be much less but most of the time, I'm learning on the bus and have to stop, walk, wait and transfer to the next connection and I suppose it's slurping up power...

Just a heads up Nick or am I on a energy high setting somehow?

Lyann

www.analternativeeducation.com

For me it is ultra low on power consumption. I run it on an IPAD 1:th gen. On an early build I did 10 skritter hours on it during a Sweden to Japan flight, including local transportation. Even now on the latest version I still can't see much of consumption. A few things I have seen that do drain your battery are those.

- temperature. If it gets warm it drains the battery faster

- set the machine to airplane mode. Wifi and 3G both take lots of power and if both are on it will much more. I think that the constant updates to the server is one thing that do uses a lot of power.

- Make sure you have the latest IOS version. They have made many battery saving updates in some of the builds.

- Adjust your screen settings. The screen is the most power consuming part. When you skritter it is on all the time and that do take power.

I usually do around 1-2 skritter hour per day on the ipad and it works very well. Recharge every 2:nd or third day or less.

It uses power but no where near that much(at least in my use)

For me 15 minutes uses 10% (61% to 51% just then)
Thats on an iphone 4, that is 21 months old.
Temp here is about 15*C.

How many apps did you have in the background ?

What was 3G signal strength ?
in low signal strength areas it transmits on higher power

Was wifi on and connected as well ?

Didn't leave the personal hotspot on and an ipad connected or have an bluetooth peripherals on ?

15 minutes 10%
30 minutes 16%
45 minutes 23%
1 hour 31%
i.e went from 61% to 30 %

iphone 4 with 3G on, wifi off , ios 5.1.1 (9B206)

wish I'd noted the battery use earlier could have had figures for two hours use

I'm using an app that claims to help the battery endurance and life.. Whether that's true or not I do feel it helps me to load better or at least more consciously, so you can search for 'battery' in the app stores and download one of these apps. I use batterydoctor, if you're skeptical about the claims of the app at least it has a long list of tips in it for saving battery...

Btw I'm using an iPod touch 4 of which the battery is less capable than the iPhone 4, but still very fine. Regarding the iPads it can skritter for so long it's never really an issue. Can't expect that with the smaller devices so you have to load well if you're planning on two hours nonstop Skrittering. I can Skritter a tad more than 3 hours with the iPod, gotta load it often anyway...

I'd love to see some more comparison testing with airplane mode on/off. My suspicion is that a lot of the power consumption does indeed come from saving to the server frequently. When we hear about more people's experiences after the launch, it may be something we can throttle down.

My iPhone is optimized for power saving consumption so I'm pretty sure I've done all that mandarinboy has suggested.

Interestingly enough, when I don't have wifi enabled or the app is unable to reach the server (like now when I'm travelling - in Taiwan no less ;) ) I get much better battery-life when studying. So Nick is probably on the dollar about reaching the server. I'll keep an eye on airplane mode on the way home but I'm willing to bet its about the same as my current functionality with data-off since I'm out of the country.

On the 3GS, I definitely notice the difference with wifi on or off. I studied for an hour and nearly 50% of my battery was gone, but turning wifi off reduces that to about 25%.
I have heard that the older the phone version, the worse the battery though, so I assume iPhone 4 or iPad will be better.

I've been using app the last couple of days, and so far my only concern is that I need to recharge my itouch way too frequently. Yesterday I left the house with a full bar,and I still took a charger because I thought it was necessary, and I still do.

I usually set it to airplane mode so that it doesn't search for wifi, but this hasn't seemed to help much

A few things I do that may extend the battery duration are using the dark theme, putting brightness on lowest (which can be annoying when using the light theme but with the dark theme I don't feel it's a problem because of the contrast black-white that's still strong enough), using auto-brightness if you're screen is quite bright (eyes can adjust to whatever level of light anyway, just give your eyes the little time to get used to lower brightness, it doesn't need bright screens),
and I just remove the back cover of my iPod when Skrittering as it does support heating up the battery quicker and drain the battery faster.

No idea how much effect these things have but seems to make sense.

@Bohan do you put your wifi searching off as well before using airplane mode? When wifi is on and I hit Airplane mode, when clicking Airplane mode off the wifi automatically starts searching again and I feel it has found the network double as fast, as well as giving the list of all networks available quicker. This suggests to me that when using airplane mode after wifi was still on there's some constant software communication between these two functions(?). It's all vague but I prefer just to put wifi off, and it means you wouldn't have to use airplane mode then anyway, its only function on the iPod is blocking wifi connecting...?

Bohan, my iPod is 18 months old, and seems to last over 2 hours of straight skittering on a full charge before it konks out. I actually think that's pretty good the for iPod - most games, such as Angry Birds, are the same way.