A mobile phone is only as useful as its battery life: after all, it wouldn’t be a phone without a charged battery. While the majority of us secure our phones with durable cases, we don’t seem to put nearly as much work into extending the life of our phones’ batteries.
Nowadays, the great majority of smartphones (as well as tablets and laptops) are powered by lithium-ion batteries. While lithium-ion batteries have a number of benefits (greater energy density results in smaller cells, which results in lighter, sleeker phones, for example), they do eventually deteriorate with usage.
Anyone who has used a mobile phone for a long period of time would likely note that the battery life diminishes with time, maybe lasting barely half a day even on a full charge. That’s because each time your phone’s lithium-ion battery charges and discharges energy, the capacity of the battery decreases.
How can we ensure that our phone’s battery lasts as long as possible? Listed here are ten things you can do:
Prevent your battery from reaching 0% or 100%
Some of you may believe that the best approach to maintain the health of your battery is to charge and discharge it entirely, that is, to charge it to 100% and then totally drain it. You may have heard that adjusting a battery improves its performance.
This is a relic of earlier battery kinds
Lithium-ion batteries do not operate in this manner. There is no memory in the battery to calibrate. On the contrary, you’re increasing the stress on your lithium-ion battery and reducing its longevity in the process: completely draining your battery at 100% vs 60% may half the battery’s lifespan.
Because lithium-ion batteries are most stressed when completely charged or fully discharged, the optimal charging method is partial charging. Ideally, you should charge your battery to around 80% and prevent letting it go below 30%. If this is not possible, aim for a maximum of 90% and begin charging your phone before it reaches 20%.
Avoid overcharging your battery
While charging your phone overnight is a frequent practice, it might actually reduce the battery’s life. When a battery is stored at 100 percent charge, it not only faces increased stress from the greater voltage, but also accumulates heat over time.
While mobile phone batteries will not overheat to the point of risk to the user, exposing them to excessive heat is one of the quickest ways to reduce their life.
If you are unable to avoid leaving your phone to charge overnight, keep it in a cool or well-ventilated area to allow the heat to disperse more quickly. For instance, not under your pillow.
Charge slowly if you can
Nobody can deny that quick charging methods save time. If you want to extend the life of your battery, you should definitely store them for emergencies only, since they might stress and harm your battery, particularly if you have an older phone.
On the other side, gently charging your battery is beneficial. As such, charging your phone through your PC or laptop may be beneficial.
If you are not using WiFi or Bluetooth, turn them off
Additionally, it’s critical to consider factors that will help your battery last longer on a single charge. After all, the fewer charge cycles your phone battery does, the more slowly it declines and the longer it lasts.
One popular way to waste battery life is to leave your phone’s WiFi or Bluetooth on while it’s not in use, since these functions use battery power while searching for networks or devices to connect to.
In reality, if you’re just travelling from one WiFi-enabled location to another, such as your house to your workplace, it’s probably not a huge concern if you don’t deactivate your phone’s WiFi. However, if you’re spending the whole day out and have no intention of using your WiFi, you should definitely switch it off to save battery life.
On a similar topic, if you own an Android smartphone, you may disable automatic WiFi, a function that allows your phone to continue scanning for networks even when WiFi is off.
Control your location-based services
Nowadays, many applications monitor your phone’s position in order to provide their services, continually searching for the most accurate location using a mix of GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell tower locations. To save battery life, it’s preferable to allow these applications to use your location services only while you’re actively using the app.
If you have an iPhone, you can adjust your choices by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. On Android phones, you may deactivate WiFi and Bluetooth scanning altogether by going to Settings > Security & Location > Location > Advanced, or by going to Settings > Applications & Notifications > Advanced > App Permissions to prevent apps from utilizing location services in the background.
Let your assistant go
While services like Google Assistant and Siri are really handy, they significantly increase your phone’s battery consumption, particularly if they are always listening for your voice instructions.
If you don’t need or use these functions often, it’s advisable to deactivate them, or at the very least their “Hey Siri” or “OK Google” voice command functionality.
Don’t close your apps, manage them instead
You may be thinking at this point that you should begin shutting off as many apps as possible on your phone to save battery life. No, not quite yet!
Closing applications, i.e. forcibly exiting apps that are running in the background on your phone, has no effect on battery life. Indeed, it has the potential to exacerbate the situation.
Both the iOS and Android operating systems have algorithms that automatically limit how much power or memory is used by background programs. By forcing applications to shut, you run the danger of sabotaging this intelligent mechanism. Additionally, accessing a closed program consumes more power than returning to a running app in the background.
Rather than that, you should be concerned with how often your programs reload in the background. Do you need Facebook or Instagram to remain updated even when you aren’t looking at them? On iOS, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh to determine which applications need continual refreshment.
On Android, you can really control the amount of battery consumption by particular apps running in the background. A better approach to shutting them off is to go to Settings > Applications & Notifications and then to Advanced > Battery > Background limitation within that apps page.
