Amazing expert tips on how to properly charge your phone. Boost battery life:
1. Dim the screen brightness
You love your smartphone's large, colourful 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. Boost battery life:
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. Boost battery life:
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 yourphone's battery life. Boost battery life:
4. Turn off Wi-Fi
As with Bluetooth, your phone's Wi-Fi radio is a serious battery
drainer. While you will 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. Boost battery life:
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.
Boost battery life:
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 also burns a lot of energy, because
every app you run uses a share of your phone's processor cycles.
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. Boost battery life:
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. Boost battery life:
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.
Boost battery life:
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? Boost battery life:
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 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 emegency use, even if your battery is down to 15 or 20 percent.
