My Blackberry recently died a soggy death and I decided that was my chance to switch from Nextel to AT&T and get an iPhone. These things are pretty cool but take some getting used to. I'm curious if any of y'all who have these fancy contraptions have found some good fishing related apps or any other 'can't do without' apps. One thing I've noticed is that the battery life is rather short. Is there any way to help this?

One more cool trick. The pics you take with your phone are GPS tagged, so if you go into the Photo app you can list them by location and pull up a map that shows where they were all taken. Very cool.

You could also try the Orvis app for it:

Animated knots
The basic fly cast
Top 10 Fly casting mistakes
Field guide for the top 100 trout flies
Fishing reports
Fly Fishing glossary and terms

You could find it at Orvis, left menu near bottom

Chris, there are several things you can do to extend the battery life.  If you're running iOS 4 and you start any kind of app that uses GPS you need to make sure the app really shuts down when you're done.  By default it will attempt to run in the background in which case you need to press the home button twice to bring up the task manager and then kill the app.

If you see the little pointer in the status bar at the top it means your GPS is running and sucks the battery like crazy.  Here's what it looks like (circled in red):



If you mainly use WIFI you can turn off the 3G radio (I leave it on) and also make sure you have Roaming turned off:



One more thing you can do is turn the Ask to Join Networks button off.  This keeps the phone from scanning for WIFI all the time you're out and about.  I work out of the house so I don't bother to turn mine off.



The 3G radio, WIFI radio, and GPS are the three biggest drains on the battery followed closely be screen brightness.  Also, talking on the phone can eat it up pretty fast too if you have long conversations.

On a typical day I use the WIFI more than the phone and I usually have 50-60% of my battery left on my iPhone 4 by the time I go to bed.  On my 3GS I would usually have 40-50% left, and the 3G was a little worse.  My original iPhone still does just fine and can easily make it a day without charging.  My daughter has a 3GS and doesn't have any problems making it all day.

Between my test units and our regular phones we have 5 iPhones in the house and haven't had battery problems with any of them.  My wife did leave her turn by turn GPS app running in the background one day and went from 100% to 0 in about 4 hours

If it keeps running out that soon I'd take it to an Apple store.  They can test it and swap it out if it's bad.

I found this after searching a bit: http://www.proposedsoluti...phone-battery-life-tips/
I made an adjustment to the push/fetch settings and it seems that now I have a little better battery life.

Thanks Jerry. It didn't really make that much sense to me to turn off push but I tried it anyway. But right now I've got 55% battery with average usage (for me) and yesterday at this time I had 20% with average usage. BTW, I take it off the charger @ 5:30 after charging all night. I also turned off the ask to join net works part.
I read around on the nets about the various operating systems sometimes having various battery sucking abilities (mine is 4.0.2). But overall I really like the device and feel it's a giant help and a step ahead of my Blackberry.
Thanks a lot for the tips, I really appreciate it.

I'll do that, thanks for the pointers. I actually just remember that I have a friend who works at one of the Apple Stores here in St. Louis - I may ask her opinion next time I see her or if I'm near the store I'll stop in.