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>Even as a Mac enthusiast, I have steered clear of the iPhone. From not having Exchange server support early on to the high cost of the phone (initially) and AT&T service (continuously), it has not been worth the investment.

Until this past weekend.

It was time for me to finally upgrade my phone, and after trying out the Palm Pre (I was a Treo addict until 2 years ago), I quickly returned it and decided to wait it out for an iPhone.

I now understand all the hype, three years running, for this device. The user interface is amazing, it is very fast, and I’m surprised at how much this phone has enamored me.

Well, this “ga ga” feeling was starting to quickly fade, as I was finding myself with battery life of about 3 hours, without me making any calls. After days of searching and struggling (accompanied by some screaming at times), I finally figured out what was causing the battery drain, and the solution to fixing it.

So, listen up if you are in a Microsoft Exchange environment and are using Entourage on your Mac as a mail client, and are enabling Push on your iPhone.

Here’s the scoop:

1. You probably know that Entourage doesn’t delete meeting invitations even after you accept them. For the life of me, I don’t know why it does this, but it seems completely useless to me.
2. As a result of #1, check to see if you have any of these things lying in your inbox. If you do, this will cause the iPhone to poll the Exchange server in Push mode every six seconds or so, and kill your battery quickly.
3. Delete all of the accepted meeting invites out of your inbox. I’d also empty the Deleted Items folder just to be sure.
4. Doing this will return the iPhone’s Push with Exchange to be true Push instead of some weird hybrid Push/Pull.
5. Delete the account on the iPhone, do a hard reset, and then add the exchange account back on.

Now, I don’t know technically why the iPhone does this when my Windows Mobile device didn’t respond similarly, but I can tell you that by doing the above fix, my battery life is now back up to something like 16 hours as opposed to the prior 3.

Good luck!