1. Dim the screen brightness or use auto
brightness
You love
your Smartphone’s large, colorful display, but it's the battery's mortal enemy.
More than any other component of your phone, the display consumes battery life
at a devastating pace. Most phones include an auto-brightness feature that
automatically adjusts the screen's brightness to suit ambient lighting levels.
This mode
uses less power than constantly running your screen at full brightness would,
of course, but you'll get even better results by turning your screen's
brightness down to the lowest setting that you can tolerate and leaving it
there. Even if you do nothing else we suggest, following this one tip will
extend the life of your battery dramatically.
2. Keep the screen timeout short
Under
your phone's display settings menu, you should find an option labeled 'Screen
Timeout' or something similar. (On an iPhone, look for Auto-Lock in the General
settings menu.) This setting controls how long your phone's screen stays lit
after receiving input, such as a tap.
Every
second counts here, so set your timeout to the shortest available time. On most
Android phones, the minimum is 15 seconds. If your screen timeout is currently
set to 2 minutes, consider reducing that figure to 30 seconds or less. On an
iPhone, the minimum you can set is 1 minute.
3. Turn off Bluetooth
No matter
now much you love using Bluetooth with your hands-free headset, your wireless
speaker or activity tracker, the extra radio is constantly listening for
signals from the outside world. When you aren't in your car, or when you aren't
playing music wirelessly, turn off the Bluetooth radio. This way, you can add
an hour or more to your phone's battery life.
4. Turn off Wi-Fi
As with
Bluetooth, your phone's Wi-Fi radio is a serious battery drainer. While you
will at times need to use your home or office Wi-Fi connection rather than 3G
or 4G for internet access and other data services, there's little point in
leaving the Wi-Fi radio on when you're out and about. Toggle it off when you go
out the door, and turn it back on only when you plan to use data services
within range of your Wi-Fi network. Android users can add the Wi-Fi toggle
widget to their home screen to make this a one-tap process, or swipe down from
the top of the screen (twice if you have Lollipop.)
In iOS
it's easier than ever to toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off. Simply swipe up
from the bottom of the screen to display the Control Centre.
The
exception to this rule is for location services, since Wi-Fi can help your
phone to obtain a GPS fix using less power.
5. Go easy on the location services and GPS
Another
big battery sucker is apps using GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile data for monitoring your
location. As a user, you can revoke apps' access to location services, or set
levels (in Android) to determine how much power they use. In Settings >
Location, you can choose High accuracy when you need it, or Battery saving when
you don't.
6. Don't leave apps running in the background
Multitasking
- the ability to run more than one app at a time - is a powerful smartphone
feature. It can also burn a lot of energy, because every app you run uses a
share of your phone's processor cycles (but this isn't true of all apps - see
the myths section below).
Some apps
themselves are particularly heavy on battery life. For example, Facebook has
confirmed it is investigating reports that its iOS app could be to blame
for significant battery drain, and is working on a fix.
"We have heard reports of some people
experiencing battery issues with our iOS app," Facebook told TechCrunch. "We're looking into this and hope to
have a fix in place soon."
By
killing apps that you aren't actually using, you can drastically reduce your
CPU's workload and cut down on its power consumption.
In Android,
tap the multi-tasking button - usually the right-most of the three icons at the
bottom of the screen - and you can swipe away apps to close them.
In iOS,
double-tap the Home button so the multitasking screen appears, then swipe
upwards to close the app.
Both iOS
and Android now have battery monitors, so you can check exactly how much each
app is using and easily spot those which are using too much power. Then you can
either uninstall them or simply make sure you quit them when you're not
actually using them.
7. Don't use vibrate
Prefer to
have your phone alert you to incoming calls by vibrating rather than playing a
ringtone? We understand the inclination; unfortunately, vibrating uses much
more power than playing a ringtone does. After all, a ringtone only has to make
a tiny membrane in your phone's speaker vibrate enough to produce sound.
In
contrast, the vibration motor rotates a small weight to make your whole phone
shake. That process takes a lot more power. If you don't want to be disturbed
audibly, consider turning off all notifications and leave the phone in view so
you can see when a new call is coming in. This approach is as courteous to your
battery as it is to your friends and colleagues.
8. Turn
off non-essential notifications
It seems
as though almost every app now polls the internet in search of updates, news,
messages, and other information. When it finds something, the app may chime,
light up your screen and display a message, make your LED blink, or do all of
the above. All of these things consume energy.
You
probably don't want to turn off notifications about new text messages or missed
calls, but turning off superfluous notifications will help your battery last a
little longer, and it will eliminate pointless distractions throughout your
day.
9. Push email
Having
your phone constantly check if there's new email is a waste of power. Instead
of allowing email to be pushed to your phone at any time, why not change the
setting to fetch mail every so often - maybe 15 or 30 minutes if you don't need
to respond immediately to anyone?
10. Power-saving modes
Depending
on your phone, you may find the manufacturer has provided power-saving features
that go beyond anything available in Android by default. (Apple's iOS doesn't
have a battery saving mode.)
Enabling
a battery-saving mode manages the phone's various power-sapping features for
you. It might, for example, prevent apps from updating in the background, dim
your screen, reduce the screen timeout setting, disable on-screen animations,
and turn off vibration. By default, this mode usually turns on when your battery
level drops to 20 percent, but you can set it to kick in at 30 percent instead.
And the sooner the phone switches to this power-saving mode, the longer its
battery will last.
A few
phones, notably from HTC and Samsung, have so-called extreme (or ultra) power
saving modes. These turn everything off except those necessary for making phone
calls and sending text messages (even turning the screen to black and
white) and can add anything up to 24 hours of emergency use, even if your
battery is down to 15 or 20 percent.
Other tips for saving battery power
Hidden
away in settings menus are usually plenty of options for disabling things like
sensors or features that you never use, and more.
Most of
these will make a minimal impact on battery life, but combined, they can become
significant.
On an
iPhone you can disable the Raise to Speak feature in the Siri settings, which
is said to increase battery life.
Finally,
as we've mentioned, it's worth rebooting your phone from time to time, rather
than leaving it in sleep mode all the time. This can sometimes cure otherwise
inexplicable battery draining problems.
Battery saving myths exposed
• Force-closing apps
doesn't always help: An app running in the background actually won't use very
much battery power at all, and by force-closing it you merely drain more power
when relaunching it causes it to reload its code to the phone's RAM
• Wi-Fi can help battery life at times: If you
have a strong Wi-Fi signal, your phone can use it rather than GPS to determine
its location for the apps that require it. And Wi-Fi uses less battery power
than GPS
• Disabling Google Now and Siri won't help: These
services drain power only when you use them and they are listening for your
command; if you don't use them much, don't lose out on a useful feature by
disabling them
• You don't have to use the charger that came with your
phone: A cheap charger can potentially damage your handset, but most
third-party chargers won't cause any issues with your battery, and many will
actually charge it faster
Don't forget to comment if you have any quires :)
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