Allyson Kazmucha, writing for The App Factor, lays out an excellent series of tips that will help extend your battery life.

To give you just a taste:

Location services let apps see where you’re located and can report that information back to the app. If you have apps set to Always, this can happen in the background without your knowledge.

I’ve never found a reason to completely disable location services, and there are even a few apps I let have full access. However, letting all apps run rampant in the background isn’t a good idea.

Ally then walks you through the settings, lays out a recommended path. Solid stuff, all the way around.

One quibble. At the end, Allyson says:

I see far too many people flicking apps out of the multitasking tray thinking it saves their battery. It actually does the complete opposite. iOS automatically saves states so apps can launch as they were without having to restart completely. Flicking them away and then restarting them actually consumes more battery.

Compare this process to putting your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down and restarting it each time. Which method do you think uses fewer resources?

I get the logic here, but there are times when a background app eats battery when it shouldn’t. The Facebook app is one example, and perhaps the most egregious, but it is not the only one. To get a sense if this is happening on your iPhone, take a look at the usage data on the Settings > Battery page. If there is an app at the top of the list that looks like it is eating far more than its fair share of battery, that app is a candidate for “flicking away”.

Sébastien Page wrote a nice piece on the logic behind not force quitting apps, worth a read if you’d like to learn more.