Smartphones have come a long way over the last few years when it comes to design, camera, or even processing power. However, we have not seen much breakthroughs when it comes to battery technology –which is critical today given that handsets come packed with mammoth sized displays, multiple sensors, and faster processors that take a toll on battery life.
While a number of smartphone makers offer ‘Fast charging’ and ‘Power modes’ to deal with the situation, a concrete solution is still nowhere to be seen.
That said, here we have listed out some lesser known tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of your smartphone battery
1. Turn off vibration and haptic feedback
We like the mild vibrations while typing on the smartphone keyboard. But they absorb a good amount of battery because we spend a lot of time on typing throughout the day.
Besides, if you don’t need to get notified by vibration, then turn the `haptic feedback’ off as it actually takes more battery power to vibrate your phone than it does to ring it.
2. Turn off vibration and haptic feedback
We like the mild vibrations while typing on the smartphone keyboard. But they absorb a good amount of battery because we spend a lot of time on typing throughout the day.
Besides, if you don’t need to get notified by vibration, then turn the `haptic feedback’ off as it actually takes more battery power to vibrate your phone than it does to ring it.
3. Keep your battery from going to 0% or 100%
Some of you might think that the best way to keep your battery healthy is to charge it and discharge it fully i.e. to try to charge it to 100% and drain it completely. You might have heard that calibrating your battery makes it work better.
This is a holdover from older battery types: lithium-ion batteries don’t work this way. There is no battery memory to calibrate. On the contrary, you’re stressing your lithium-ion battery more and shortening its lifespan by doing so: discharging your battery fully at 100% compared to 60% can halve the lifespan of your battery .
Because lithium-ion batteries come under the most stress when they’re fully charged or fully drained the best approach is partial charging. Ideally you should charge your battery up to about 80% and avoid having it drop lower than 30%. If this isn’t practical, try to aim for a maximum of 90% and to start charging your phone before it hits 20%.
4. Avoid charging your battery beyond 100%
While leaving your phone to charge overnight is a common habit, it can actually shorten its battery lifespan. When kept at 100% charge your battery not only experiences higher stress from the higher voltage, heat also builds up over time.
While mobile phone batteries wont overheat to the point that it’s dangerous to the user, exposing a battery to high heat is one of the fastest ways to shorten its lifespan.
If you can’t avoid leaving your phone to charge overnight, make sure its in cool or well-ventilated place so the heat can more easily dissipate. For example, not under your pillow.
5. Turn on airplane mode
This is not an everyday solution, but can help you cut battery usage. Turning on airplane mode will cut you from the outside world, but will allow your smart phone to last longer for multimedia apps such as videos, music player or games that don’t need any connectivity.
It can do wonders if you are travelling in a poor network zone where your smartphone antennas consume a lot of power to register on the available networks. Simply turn on the airplane mode if you don’t want to receive any calls, messages or use the internet.
6. Check GPS, Bluetooth, NFC
Also, don’t forget to check on Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC and mobile data if you are not using them. Switch off the Wi-Fi if you are connected on mobile data and vice versa. The NFC feature may get turned on if you restart your NFC-enabled handset, so keep a check on this too.
7. Customise which apps can use Location
Most of the apps that are installed on your smartphone (Android/iOS) constantly track your location. You might not want to turn it off while using Google Maps, Uber, sending location on WhatsApp, Tinder, etc. however keeping it on throughout the day while you don’t need location tracking will simply kill your smartphone battery. Turn it off while you are just using your handset for watching videos, sending e-mails, and apps where you don’t need location tracking.
