No matter how much manufacturers improve battery life, we’re always going to want more. The good news here is that we, the individual users, have a lot of power in that regard. Sadly, most smartphone users never change the default settings on their phones even if some of those settings are annoying, and some of them are. Below you’ll find a list of tips and tricks to help squeeze more juice out of your battery, so you can spend more time using it and less time with it on your recharging station.
Turn It Off
This one has to be first. If you’re not using it, turn it off. If you miss the fact that your third cousin’s ex boyfriend’s aunt posted a new kitten picture on Facebook, for twenty minutes, it’s fairly probable that the world will not come to an end, and this one simple step can double, or even triple the life of your battery.
Manage Your Own Power
If you’ve got an Android based phone, you can go to Settings ? Battery, or Settings ? About Phone and see a list of all the current battery drains on your phone. The biggest one will be the screen. That’s true now, and as screen sizes continue to increase, it’s going to be more true in the future. You can reduce that one simply by toning down the brightness of your screen’s display. If you absolutely must have maximum brightness, then you can look at changing the time interval for sleep mode/ screen timeout.
Here, you’ll also be able to see how each of the apps you’re running is impacting your battery life. Many apps are designed to poll at some interval, and each time they do they’re sucking down battery power. If you find that you’ve got a number of apps installed that you seldom use, getting rid of them can extend your battery life. Where the apps you use and want to keep are concerned, increase the time interval between polling to extend battery life.
Accessorize
Sometimes the best way to extend your battery life is to have more of them. Spares, or solar powered portable charging stations so you can keep the good times rolling even while on the go.
Rethink Widgets
Widgets are great, but they can be power hogs. The most common example is the fact that people often have a weather widget sitting on their desktop to tell them if it’s sunny outside or not. This widget polls constantly to get the latest information from whatever server is hosting it, and of course, in the process, it’s draining your battery. Multiply that by however many widgets you’ve got on your home screen, and you begin to see why your batter never seems to last very long.
Smartphones are fantastic, versatile devices. We can get more life, use and functionality out of them though if we take a commonsense approach to power management. You don’t have to live in a technological wasteland in order to dramatically increase the life of your battery, but you do have to be proactive about it.
