Your iPhone comes preloaded with many features you may not be aware of. Some are for fun, while others are crucial to keeping you and your phone safe.
Your phone can be a lifeline in an emergency. By activating your iPhone’s Emergency SOS feature, you can call local emergency services and update your chosen contacts when needed. Tap or click here for emergency settings to check on your iPhone now before you need them.
Other features are less critical and can even be detrimental to your smartphone experience. Here are three new features introduced with iOS 16 that you can turn off to extend your phone’s battery life.
1. Do you need those widgets?
iOS 16 saw the lock screen receive an overhaul. You can now showcase your favorite photos with multiple lock screens, customize font styles and display widgets.
Widgets show you current information at a glance, such as news, weather, calendar events and battery levels. You can add widgets to your home and lock screens to access this information easily.
As convenient as widgets are, they force apps to run in the background. They’re constantly retrieving data to update your widget information, which uses data and drains power.
If you have widgets on your lock screen, you can switch to another lock screen without widgets whenever you put your phone away.
You can also completely remove widgets from your lock screen:
- Press down on your lock screen and tap Customize.
- Choose Lock Screen and tap on a widget.
- Hit the — button on each widget to remove it.
RELATED: Apple how-to: Turn off read receipts on your iPhone and iPad
2. Haptic feedback
With Apple’s latest iOS, you can feel a tap after you perform some actions, such as when you touch and hold the camera icon on the home screen. This is haptic feedback.
You can also set it to activate when you type. You’ll feel a vibration with each tap, which can be helpful when your phone is in silent mode and you can’t hear the click of each tap.
Unfortunately, this setting affects your battery life. Give it a shot if you’d like, but turn it off if you want to go longer between charges:
- Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback.
- Toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.
3. Move it or lose it
With iOS 16, you no longer need an Apple Watch to complete your Move goals. The new Fitness app, previously only available on Apple’s smartwatch, can help you track your health and fitness goals from your iPhone.
Fitness tracks your data by default from the Health app, even if you haven’t set it up. If you’re not using this feature, you can turn it off to save some battery life:
- Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Motion & Fitness and toggle off Fitness Tracking.
You may also like: iPhone trick: How to copy and paste text and images from your photos