Battery Drain?

I used Ocarina for maybe 4-5 minutes and noticed a large chunk of my battery was used up.

Anybody have similar experiences? I enjoy the app quite a bit (aside from having the Zelda theme stuck in my head now) and was wondering if there were a way to extend battery life while using it.

Thanks,

ko

yeah it does take quite a bit of power...

but it took me about 20-30 minutes for about quarter off my battery.

Ahhhh yes the drain on the battery. I have had quite a bit of experience with this on my travels with Smule apps around the west coast. It will take around 2 hours for it to fully drain your battery if you use Ocarina pretty much constantly. As of right now there is no way around this but hopefully Apple will make a better battery standard in the next gen of iPhones.

If you need a small charger for traveling though there's always the DIY MintyBoost!

http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/

Or commercial portable chargers such as this

http://www.atbatt.com/product/20261.asp

But I think the MintyBoost will have more charge capacity and is easier to use once you've built it since you can add batteries any time.

Rock on!

-The Mule

Although I love the animation of breath and pressed holes. Wouldn't it be helpful to switch off the backlight off the screen to reduce the battery usage?

Not sure if it helps, but maybe you should switch off the "share your melodies" option so it will not send what you're playing using Internet connection.

All the usual iPhone battery saving tricks apply. You can dim the backlighting in the preferences panel, for one thing. Also, if you're not going to be sharing your tunes and aren't worried about getting incoming calls, switching to "Airplane Mode" will save a lot of juice.

Ouch, yes, battery drain and iPhone case heating up (if left in my leather case)!

Here is another thing i have found out for myself: As Ocarina of course drains battery power rather aggressively, and seems to consequently NEED peak power available for proper function at least in my own iPhone.

As mentioned in this forum "playability" thread, some people are experiencing issues with "holes" opening and closing unpredictably.

I have found out that keeping the phone powered via its charge cable does stabilize operation completely. No more holes opening and closing willy nilly. In fact, seems that as long as battery power stays full, things work well on battery power only for a very short time... Problem: it does not last long! So, back to charger (or USB) cable again; I leave my iPhone plugges into external power when using Ocarine. Perhaps it is just a coincidence with my iPhone (iPhone2g - Dec. 07)

- Roger T

ADDITIONAL NOTE/Correction: indeed, there are two issues - power consumption and grounding. I use a leather case on my phone, and correctly enough, plugging the phone into external power, as well as touching the metal part of the case, and also just plugging something into the iphone's dock port, all work in regard to note accuracy.

- rt

If autoshare is on, your constantly connected using 3g. This will drain the battery significantly. Switch this off. Or if you want to record you performance, switch to manual. Then you can upload when your ready.