By Ned McRae
One of the most frustrating things that can happen is when you’re on the phone with a friend or listening to music and suddenly your phone cuts out. You look at your phone and realise that your battery is dead. These days it’s easy to drain your phone battery as we have to use them all day for all sorts of tasks. Luckily, there are many methods you can utilise in order to extend the battery life of your mobile phone. In this article, we will outline all the tips and tricks you need to ensure your battery lasts all day long.
The easiest way to instantly make your battery last longer is by simply switching on Power Saving Mode in the settings of your smartphone. By switching this setting on, your phone will intelligently limit functions that eat battery charge. It will typically lower screen brightness, limit CPU performance, and disables apps from refreshing in the background. Android devices have some customisablity when it comes to what exactly Power Saving Mode does. For example, Samsung phones give you the option to limit CPU speed or lower brightness when Power Saving Mode is enabled, independently of each other. There are also options to schedule battery saving mode, or turn it on once your phone drops below a certain charge percentage.
Your phone has a lot more screen settings than just brightness, which can greatly assist in increasing your mobile battery life. Your phone screen is one of the biggest causes of battery usage, so adjusting screen settings can change the battery life game.
Screen brightness can have a big impact on battery life, so if you’re serious about extending battery life, then consider decreasing your screen brightness. You can go a step further by disabling auto-brightness, so that you have complete control over your screen’s brightness.
Decreasing the time it takes for your screen to time out can potentially yield massive improvements to battery life, as it reduces the time your screen is on and sucking up battery. Try chaning it to something like 10 or 15 seconds, so you don’t waste any battery when you aren’t using your phone.
The final way to increase battery life by changing screen settings is by changing ‘raise to wake’ where your phone screen turns on every time you lift up your phone. Not only does this drain battery unnecessarily, it can also be distracting. This is a great setting to disable for those that not only want to increase their battery life, but also boost their productivity. Some phones have an ‘always on display’ which can needlessly drain battery life. These displays are typically only found with OLED screens, where the always on display has a negligible effect on battery life. Nevertheless, if you are hell-bent on extracting every morsel of battery life from your mobile phone, then disable always on display.
The next step to increase battery performance is to get into the nitty-gritty of your smartphone’s settings. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data and, most importantly, location services all utilise battery life as they are constantly being used, searching for networks and GPS signals. You can quickly and easily disable all of these setting by enabling aeroplane mode in your phone, however doing this will prevent you from making or receving phone calls and SMS.
Bonus tip: enabling aeroplane mode can reduce charging time!
Phone apps continue to run in the background, even when you aren’t using them. This naturally consumes battery charge over time. To minimise the impact apps have when running in the background, you can change a few settings which help to increase your mobile battery life. Turning off ‘Background App Refresh’ will limit the amount of energy consumed by apps running in the background.
You can also find which apps use the most battery in the background by going into battery settings in your smart phone. This will allow you to single out which apps are the greatest culprits of battery usage, allowing you to tailor your phone settings to specific apps. iPhone and Android both support turning off background app refresh for specific apps, but Android takes it one step further by selecting ‘Sleeping Apps’. Sleeping apps reduces the amount of updates the app receives, therefore reducing battery and data usage.
Android has lots of customisation when it comes to adjusting your phone’s performance. You can reduce the processor speed if you don’t need it. You can also reduce the screens refresh rate, which will reduce battery expenditure. Android also allows you to enable these functions automatically using ‘routines’. You can set up a power saving mode depending on the time of day or your location. For example, you can enable power saving when you arrive at work, or every day from 0900 until 1700. This means you can decrease your phone’s performance and save battery when you don’t need it, without having to remember to change all of your settings.
You can change all sorts of settings in order to extend your battery life, but they can only do so much, and eventually your battery will run out of charge despite your best efforts. The single most effective way to prevent your phone from dying while out and about is to use a portable battery. A portable battery is exactly what it sounds like - a portable battery that you can use to charge your smart phone. These come in all shapes and sizes depending on how much charge they hold and if they have some additional features. These are great as they can hold multiple charges; great for if you’re out and about for a long day, or camping for days at a time. You can also get cases that have a battery built in to keep your phone charged.
That’s everything you can do to ensure your phone battery doesn’t run out of charge. Stay connected with SpinTel’s excellent value mobile plans.
