Hard reset and a clean install question

Plug connect your iphone into iTunes. On the main screen click "Restore". Then follow the instructions. To do it right set up your iPhone as a "new phone" when prompted. Do not restore form a back up.

 

Depends on who you ask, but a hard reset is either "hold the home and start buttons until the phone restarts" or just "turn the phone off and then on."

 

The hard reset guide is pretty easy to find using google

but it's press the sleep/wake button (top of phone) and the home screen button together for about 10 seconds and only release when you see the apple logo.

I personally think you should only hard reset if your phone has become unresponsive. Hard resetting is a failsafe option for when your phone locks. Doing so when iOS is running normally with apps running can risk data corruption or data loss as it is like yanking the power out of a running desktop. Apps aren't gracefully shut down like a normal soft reboot.

A soft or hard reboot will cure battery problems if you have rogue apps consuming resources like GPS bugs, memory or cpu bugs. In this case you can either try manually closing all none iOS apps or rebooting your phone normally.


As for restoring your phone to factory default, providing you run iCloud and have all your email / cal synced etc it will restore as it were. I'm not going to dispute the point about factory restore fixes battery life, if people have found this to be true i have no reason to not believe them, I've just not had to do it so far. Perhaps some high intensity games left at idle can cause problems but i don't game much on my devices so i wouldn't be susceptible to that.


Just do the sensible things like checking your not running max brightness and viewing videos over 3G or even wireless. Turn off bluetooth when it isn't needed and be mindful that if you have low 3G signal at any point during the day, the phone will increase power consumption to try and maintain a stable 3G signal... thus using a lot more battery.

Optimal 3G signal i.e. 4 or 5 bars, realistic screen brightness and perhaps some gimmicks like raise to speak turned off you should see 5, possibly 6 hours usage and a day and a half standby.