While Guy Kawasaki might be able to get 36 hours of standby life out of his iPhone 3G, many of the rest of us are struggling with having enough power to make it through a day.

Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine in Seattle, came up with a great idea for any iPhone developers in the TUAW audience. He’d like to see an iPhone power miser application that could turn off 3G, location services, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and push e-mail with one tap (low drain mode), then turn on all of the same services with another tap (full power mode).

The process of going from power-sucking battery-hog to power-conserving battery-miser would take one-click.

  • Click on Settings
  • Click on wifi
  • Slide wifi slider to off
  • Click on Settings Back button
  • Click on Fetch New Data
  • Slide Push slider to off
  • Click on Settings Back button
  • Click on General
  • Slide Location Services slider to off
  • Click on Bluetooth
  • Slide Bluetooth slider to off
  • Click on General Back button
  • Click on Network
  • Slide Enable 3G slider to off
  • Click Home button to get back to main screen


Davidson explains that it currently takes him 15 steps to disable the power-hungry features of his 3G, and another 15 steps to turn those features back on. Whether or not those features are something that the average NDA'd iPhone developer can actually control is one big question; if they aren't, this would be a great app for Apple to develop -- quickly