Apple added a new “low power mode” to the iPhone as part of iOS 9.
You’ll be prompted to activate it each time your phone reaches 20
percent battery, but you can also enable it before that point to stretch
your battery power further.
This changes many of the settings people commonly change when they
want to make their iPhones live longer between charges. For whatever
reason, low power mode is only available on iPhones, not iPads.
How to Activate (and Deactivate) Low Power Mode
When your iPhone reaches 20 percent battery power left, you’ll see a
“Low Power Mode” prompt appear. Your iPhone will inform you what
features will be temporarily disabled, and you can choose to “Continue”
and enable low power mode or “Cancel” and not enable low power mode. Low
power mode can reportedly give you anywhere from one to three hours
more time before your iPhone dies.
You can also enable low-power mode whenever you like. For example,
let’s say it’s the start of a long day and you know you’ll be away from
an outlet for a long while. To do this, open the Settings app, scroll
down, and tap the new “Battery” category. Activate the “Low Power Mode”
slider to enable it. The battery indicator in the status bar will turn
yellow while low power mode is enabled.
Your iPhone will always automatically disable low-power mode when you
charge it up to a certain point. Low power mode is always temporary and
only lasts until the next proper charge.
What Low Power Mode Does
Low power mode does a number of things to save battery power. It
automatically changes some settings to save battery power, disabling
automatic fetching of new mail, reducing your screen brightness, and
automatically locking the phone and powering off its display more
quickly. Apps can detect low power mode is enabled and choose to disable
animations and other battery-hungry features, too.
Motion effects and animated wallpapers are also disabled. Background
activities and networking are paused to prevent unnecessary power drain
in the background. Your iPhone even automatically reduces the
performance of its CPU and GPU, which makes it perform a bit slower but
saves battery life. Tests have found that this slows iPhones by about 40
percent when low power mode is enabled.
Low power mode is fairly aggressive, which is why it isn’t enabled
all the time. It’ll help you squeeze more battery life out of your phone
when necessary, but you probably wouldn’t want to use it all the time.
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