10 Ways to Conserve Smartphone Battery Life: The Power Management

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Technology behind smartphone is evolving at a very fast pace, unlike the past era, people are not reluctant to adopt the new expertise with respect to their devices. However, when it comes to battery life, the same people then take a back seat before delving deeper into the ocean of technology. Smartphones have witnessed a major leap in terms of huge screen, fast CPUs and other eye catching system features but batteries still haven’t crosses the initial threshold.

Till the time, technology behind new super batteries make its heyday, we have to make an effort from our end in stretching the life of our cellular batteries. I have come up with a few tips, which helped me in making my smartphone battery lasted longer I hope it might help you as well. And as always, I’m open to suggestions, so here we go,

1) Airplane Mode: Putting phone on airplane mode saves a lot of battery, so next time, if you are at the subway for a greater part of the time or at the basements or at any remote place where you feel getting signals would be a problem, then switching your smartphone to airplane mode is the best option for controlling the excessively discharge of battery. Since the cellular phone would exhaust most of its stored battery for searching for better signal.

2) Battery’s Nadir: Avoid your cellular device to touch the nadir of its battery. The chemistry within lithium ion batteries prefers partial discharge to deep discharge. Ideally, the window of battery must lie between 20% – 80%. Generally, the shelf- life of these batteries lasts for not more than 3 years. So expecting them to work for like 5 years is not a way out.

3) Vibration Mode: Putting all the mechanical motions of the device to zero would also help in saving battery. This corresponds to turning off the vibration mode of course. In addition, keeping the volume of ringtone to the minimum would also help in banking on the same.

4) Bluetooth & Wi-Fi: Keeping Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi connectivity on all the time is like creating a hole in the battery tank of cellular phone. In situation like this, whether you are using or not using either of them, the battery will continuously discharge. Prefer sticking to cables while transferring files and use the option when there is no other choice left for file transfer. And for Wi-Fi, enable it only as per the requirement.

5) Flashing Lights: Turning down on the brightness as well as backlight would also help in conserving power since, the relatively bigger screens of smartphones are the ones that devours most part of the battery. Although some phones do come with mode that changes the light settings automatically as per the external (light) conditions, however, devices where there isn’t any such feature can slash down the settings to the minimum manually.

6) Moving Wallpapers: Static wallpapers are better than live wallpapers or dynamic animations after all, who is going to see what’s on the home-screen when the cell phone is in your pocket or purse anyway. If you think those are important in terms of aesthetic sense, well there are other ways to jingle with the cellphone than putting the animations at the stake on battery’s power.

7) Black Background: Although black or dark background ain’t as catchy as the 3D scenes but they are suited well when we are looking for options that carry battery life improvements. The plain black background not only makes the text easier to read and of course less puts strain on the eyes but they also offer the apps icons to stand out relatively. If we talk about saving battery life, yes, but on an AMOLED display, since the display will produce less light hence, less power consumption.

8) Alternate Charger: Try not to switching the charger with the actual one for a particular device. In case of malfunctioning, go for replacement at the earliest. Chances are higher of giving out wrong voltage to the phone and causing it to over-heat if the phone is charged using a different charger. I tried charging my Sony Xperia smartphone with Samsung’s charger. It took more time to charge relatively and got overheated within 15 minutes. In the long run, it would definitely affect the battery life as well. It will surely get the job done but might not be the preferred method.

9) Dual SIM Phones: Cellular phone with dual SIM functionality ends up consuming more power when both SIM cards are active simultaneously. Technically, it means one cell phone but containing all the wireless services of two phones at the same time. Even when both the SIM cards are in standby mode, the phone is on lookout for the respected two network providers, which means, adding constraints on the life of battery. Therefore, putting one SIM at an active mode must be preferred until there is an urgent requirement otherwise.

10) Software Updates: Power management is one amongst the other priority issues that engineers behind smartphones are working upon, hence updating the cellular phone with the latest software that is being released is quite an important task, which we can do from our end.

Trying manual updating the installed apps than auto-updating can also be included. Usually, the auto-updates start when we least expect them, and it makes a dent in the battery life. It happened with me once, and so I immediately switched it to manual mode. It seems daunting first but then the idea behind manual updating steers away my cumbersomeness.

It’s been quite some time now, I have been following these battery saving tips and have gained substantially in my smartphone battery life, I hope it does the same with you too.

Image: phonearena.com

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