Reading e-Books kills my battery life

[dragon499]

With my iPad 4 (64 Gig wifi + AT&T 3G) I normally get close to the advertised ten hours of battery life with a full charge, whether I am browsing or playing games. However, if I read on the Kindle app, or the iBooks app, or the Nook app, or the Kobo app, my battery drains like crazy. If I only read, I would not get more than four hours and forty minutes of battery life with a full charge! I have auto brightness on and the brightness set to full.

Is this normal, or is something wrong with my iPad?

 

[scifan57]

With my iPad 4 (64 Gig wifi + AT&T 3G) I normally get close to the advertised ten hours of battery life with a full charge, whether I am browsing or playing games. However, if I read on the Kindle app, or the iBooks app, or the Nook app, or the Kobo app, my battery drains like crazy. If I only read, I would not get more than four hours and forty minutes of battery life with a full charge! I have auto brightness on and the brightness set to full.

Is this normal, or is something wrong with my iPad?

Turn the brightness down to the lowest level you are comfortable with. You can also set the Kindle to show a black screen with white printing. Doing both of these will do quite a bit to increase your battery life.

 

[dragon499]

I am not comfortable with a lower light level. I'll try the Kindle option that you suggested.

 

[dragon499]

I'm not sure whether reading is killing the battery, or if something else is wrong. I just switched the Kindle to show a black screen with white printing. However, after reading for 20 minutes, starting with a 100% charge, I am now down to 93% battery life. My math shows that means I would only get 4:45 of battery life only reading!

Unfortunately, I am jailbroken and can not bring this to the apple store. I'm considering giving up the JB, going to 7.0 and seeing if the "restore" will fix things. I had this problem before and the only way to fix it was to restore to factory settings.

 

[scifan57]

Maybe one of your jailbroken tweaks is actually responsible for the excessive battery drain?

 

[dragon499]

I haven't added any tweaks since I first jailbroke. Until recently I haven't had any battery problems. These are all of the tweaks that I have:

3G Unrestrictor
Sbsettings and Activator
PC Networking
XCon

If one of the tweaks is responsible for the excessive battery drain, then one of the tweaks that was updated must be causing it, as the original installs did not cause any problems. When I last had a battery drainage issue, it was with an unbroken iPad 1. It was resolved after I restored it to factory settings.

Right now, the only tweak that I use a lot is is PC Networking. If a video is too big to email to myself, I feel like I am in the Dark Ages if I have to plug the iPad into a PC in order to access the camera roll.

An any event, I'm now backing up to the cloud, in preparation for biting the bullet and upgrading to IOS 7.

 

[dragon499]

After all this, the problem was indeed my brightness settings!

I lost my jailbreak by upgrading to IOS 7, but the battery was still bleeding when I had the brightness all the way up. I then slid the setting to around 40% brightness and now I get the full 10 (or more!) hours of battery life.

Live and learn!

 

[Bennettb]

This happens to me also. Reading, either in overdrive library or iBooks, uses my battery faster than anything else. I keep the light for everything I do at the level that allows me to see best.

Bobbi