Background

Unless you’ve been living in Vega, Texas, you’ve probably heard the iPhone does not have a replaceable battery, meaning you can’t bring a second (or third etc.) to pop in that iPhone when you run out of juice, like you can with a notebook computer.

I just got back from a 3-day camping-at-night roadtrip, and I had my iPhone on me. Here’s what I learned about power management.

iPhone Travel Tips

So what can you do on the road? Here’s some quick tips:

1. bring a car charger Pretty simple stuff. We had a Belkin iPod charger that worked fine for my iPhone. It’s just slow to charge the iPhone.
2. bring your wall charger and grab AC power whenever you can The iPhone recharges much faster from AC wall power than it does from a car charger. As few as 15 mintes can give you a 1/4 to 1/3 charge. We’d stop at restaurants and I’d find an AC outlet and pop the phone in it.
3. turn off WiFi while driving You won’t need it, and it sucks juice.
4. dim the display I had mine on auto-dim, and realized I could really conserve battery by turning this off and moving the slider as far left as I could stand.

Next time I’ll come equipped with a solar charger, an external USB phone charger, or both. Fighting for  car charger time (vs. another iPhone owner and an ancient MP3 player) was no fun.