Is your phone’s battery life draining super fast? Here’s what you need to do.
A 10-Step Guide to Prolong Your Phone’s Battery Life
Whether you have an Android or an iPhone, the issue with battery life has always been a major concern of several smartphone users worldwide.
Although most phone manufacturers are constantly improving their phones’ battery longevity to meet consumer demands, the issue with battery life is sometimes caused by the unhealthy smartphone habits of the consumers themselves.
If you find your brand new phone’s battery life draining at an abnormally faster rate, it might have something to do with the way you’re using your phone rather than the device itself.
To get the most out of your phone’s battery life, it is important to understand what’s draining your battery life and how you can address these issues.
So without further ado, here is a 10-step guide to help you prolong your phone’s battery longevity.
1. Avoid overheating your phone.
Extreme heat is a major battery killer. Constant exposure to excessive temperature ranges will cause your phone’s battery to stop working, bulge, bubble, or even worse — spark in flames and blow up.
Heat causes excessive power consumption, which can significantly degrade your phone’s battery life capacity.
Your phone’s battery capacity is determined by its Battery Life Cycle, which is the number of charge and discharge cycles that a battery can complete before gradually losing performance.
If you’re using your phone excessively, you’ll end up recharging it a lot more often, generating more heat and causing a rapid decline in its battery capacity.
Once you feel your phone heating up, stop using it and give it a rest. If you need to rest to avoid over-fatigue, so does your phone.
2. Always use an appropriate charger.
It is highly recommended that you stick to using the charger that came with your phone or a charger issued by your phone’s original manufacturer. Original chargers are optimized to provide the most suitable charging process for your phone.
Using an alternative or a cheap variant as opposed to the original brand charger may potentially void your phone’s warranty services or worse, a charger with a different output voltage/amperage may significantly damage your phone’s battery and cause it to explode or catch fire.
3. Adjust your phone’s brightness level.
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who turn up their phone screen brightness at a maximum level even if they’re in a dimly lit or dark room.
You. Don’t. Need. That. Much. Brightness.
Unless you’re using your phone outside or you’re trying to light up the darkest recesses of space, try to tone down and regulate your phone screen’s brightness to an appropriate level.
Extremely bright screens are major battery life consumers. Your smartphone’s screen consumes a significant amount of energy —usually a lot more than any other component.
Therefore, one of the best ways to avoid excessive battery drain is to reduce your screen brightness.
4. Adjust your screen timeout settings.
In relation to tip number 3 on this list, adjusting your phone screen’s timeout settings can also help you save some battery life.
Whether you have an Android or an iPhone, you can always adjust your screen’s timeout in the settings menu.
If your phone screen is always on for long periods of time, this can cause relatively increased levels of battery consumption.
5. Use Dark Mode for phones with OLED screens.
According to a research study conducted by Pranad Dash and Ying Charlie Hu from Purdue University, switching to Dark Mode on phones with OLED screens at 100% screen brightness saves an average of 39%-47% of battery power.
However, it is essential to note that this battery-saving method only applies to phones with OLED screen panels with screens at full brightness.
OLED stands for “Organic Light Emitting Diodes”. With OLED panels, each pixel is individually lit, which allows for true black pixels. Hence, using Dark Mode on phones with OLED screens could vastly improve your phone’s battery life.
On the other hand, phones with LCD screen panels do not benefit from the Dark Mode setting since LCD displays are backlit. Meaning, a light needs to shine through the screen display to give it brightness. Each pixel is not individually lit unlike OLED screens.
To find out if your phone is using an OLED or an LCD screen, check your phone settings or you may quickly do a Google Search.
6. Disable your phone’s Bluetooth, Airdrop, and GPS / Location Services if they’re not in use.
If you’re not using your Bluetooth, Airdrop, and GPS / Location, turn them off or disable them.
Your phone’s GPS chip will continuously track and calculate distances by transmitting data with satellites. This ongoing process consumes power and drains your phone’s battery life.
Turning on Bluetooth and Airdrop all the time will also consume more battery life since your phone will keep scanning for nearby devices or gadgets that it can connect to.
Improve your phone’s battery life by turning these features off when not in use.
7. Limit push notifications.
Push notifications affect your battery life because they prompt your phone’s screen display to light up with each alert.
To counter this problem, review the apps that are currently installed on your phone and determine the ones that you don’t consider to be that important or significant.
Limit the push notifications for these apps to save some battery life.
8. Optimize apps to lower background activity.
Social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram continuously run in the background to check for notifications, even if you’re not using them. These lurking background app activities are silent battery killers.
Optimizing your apps will put them to sleep when not in use and limit their background activity, causing a decreased rate of battery consumption.
However, it might be best to be selective about which apps you are going to optimize. Limiting the background app activities of messaging apps such as Messenger or WhatsApp might delay the arrival of messages and notifications coming from these apps.
9. Turn on Power Saving Mode when you’re almost running out of battery.
As the name itself implies, Power Saving Mode or Battery Saving Mode works by saving your phone’s power or battery life.
This battery-saving feature will automatically limit the background activities on your phone, slightly reduce your phone screen’s max display brightness, and decrease your phone’s performance.
In other words, your phone will run slower but it will eventually save your battery life.
10. Switch from 5G to 4G LTE mobile data for casual use.
5G smartphones are becoming a lot more common these days.
Although 5G is significantly faster than 4G in terms of internet speeds, using 5G mobile data also consumes a lot more battery power.
According to a research done by the company ViserMark, smartphones utilizing 5G mobile data consume 10% more battery life than smartphones that utilize 4G.
If you’re simply using your phone for some casual web browsing, switch to 4G mobile data instead of 5G to increase your battery longevity.
