Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Save your iPhone battery. Turn off as many Foursquare features as possible.

Foursquare Radar Settings
Foursquare Radar Settings 

RADAR features of that social geotagging platform started killing smartphones' batteries. Disable that stuff to gain several hours of battery life of active participation in social media while you're on the go.


Radar Notification update in 4sq from several weeks ago was built to make your check-in activity faster, easier and more productive, mainly in 2 ways:


  1. Shortcut to checking in - in some cases, 1 or 2 taps would suffice
  2. Instead of searching for places to check-in to, 4sq would ask if you want to check-in to a place that you are relatively close to


One might think, what a relief to those who:
  • use Foursquare to locate cool places in the area or for 
  • those who are totally new and want to get to know their new neighborhoods

Theoretically, it is. However, instead of making it faster, easier and more productive for me, considering significant battery life impact, I started learn to live without those fugazy time saving features.

It turns out that Foursquare actually shares a warning pop-up message as you enable those battery draining qualities. You most likely must have tapped right through the update process to enable to battery eating monster. It did save a couple of searches and taps, but it kept me tied to wall outlets - waiting for my phone to charge up again. Not the best use of anyone's time. Instead of strolling the city, my eyes where looking for cafe's where I could sneak in 10-15 minutes of battery charge while sipping my Caramel Macchiato.

Try disabling those new features of Foursquare and you'll see your phone will not have to be charged as frequently. I wonder how many other mobile apps turn into battery life suckers once 1 or 2 new features get enabled.