Regain Reduced Battery life & Improve Edge speeds

One of the most interesting thing of a revolutionary gadget like the iPhone is that there is always someone out there in the blogosphere figuring out a trick or two to make it work better. In this article I write about an iPhone trick for all those who have hacked their iPhone and are observing reduced battery life and the other is an iPhone tip by none other than the iPhone hacking genius Natetrue on how to get better speeds of the EDGE network. I am sure the last one would have got all you iPhone owners interested so read after the jump for more details.

Observing reduced Battery Life after Installing Third-Party iPhone Hacks or Applications?
If you are still on firmware 1.0.2 and have installed those cool third-party iPhone applications but are observing reduced battery life then here is some good news. Michael Johnston over at iPhoneAlley has identified the culprit (application) which could be draining your iPhone's battery life.

The iPhone application which could be causing the issue is OpenSSH in case you have it installed on your iPhone, the tool which allows remote login to your iPhone from a computer. Michael also has a logical explanation for it, he says "The problem is, SSH requires that a listener called SSHD constantly runs, waiting for a remote login attempt. This in turn drains your battery."

Hmm, so now that you know the culprit your first reaction would be to uninstall it from your iPhone, maybe that is not required as there is a cleaner solution to this problem. The solution is to disable SSH which can be achieve using a simple tool called Services. Assuming that you have already installed Installer.app and OpenSSH on your iPhone all you need to do is download Community Sources in case not already done, then under Utilities in Installer.app, install Services. After you have waited for the iPhone to reload the homescreen and see the Services icon tap to launch Services and simply toggle SSH off.

Once SSH is turned off using the above instructions you should no longer observe the reduced battery life.

= = =

Want to better Edge speeds?

You might have already figured this out or known about it but when I read about this iPhone tip over at Natetrue's blog I found it quite interesting and thought I should share it with you folks. Just prior to the iPhone launch David Pogue in his review on the iPhone had declared the iPhone has a black plastic part on its back. "That's where the antenna is," he said and he went on to give the reason saying "Cellphone signals have a hard time going through metal, which is why this one piece is made of plastic."

The iPhone tip that will help you improve your Edge speeds revolves around this black plastic part where the antenna is placed. NateTrue has observed that if you take your hand off the antenna i.e. bottom part of the iPhone then you would observe not only an obvious improvement when you have low signal strength but even with a full signal one should see a 25% increase in Edge speeds. So it is not just metal cellphone signals have a hard time going through its also your hand.

In fact he goes on to add that your hand must remain three-quarter inches away from that antenna otherwise you exceed FCC limits for radio exposure.

These are both interesting iPhone tips, it would be great to find out how well they worked for you.. ..Go with a practical.