19 Simple Ways to Make the Most of your Phone Battery

Whether you’re an iPhone or Android person, most of us agree that smartphones are a force for good in our lives, helping us to organise our lives with a variety of useful apps, and taking great videos and photos to capture precious memories. Despite this, smartphones are renowned for their short battery lives, which can be extremely frustrating in today’s digital world. Here at Battery Experts, we have a number of tips and tricks for you to try out if you’re looking to extend the battery life of your phone as much as possible.

Avoid running out of battery at the worst possible moment by trying some of the tricks below.

 

Don’t leave your phone in the sunlight

Lithium-ion batteries, the type of batteries the smartphones use, perform at their best when they’re kept slightly below room temperature. By keeping your phone out of direct sunlight and warm places, such as your car, you’ll see that your phone’s battery starts lasting that little bit longer.

 

Bring the brightness down a bit

The brighter your phone screen is, the more battery power is spent keeping it lit up. Turning the battery down will help you see a dramatic difference to the length of your battery life, and it’s kinder to your eyes too! You can adjust the brightness of your phone quite simply in your settings.

Some Androids and iPhones offer an Auto-Brightness function, which will adjust your brightness in response to your surroundings. This will save you a small amount of battery life as it automatically dulls your screen a bit when you’re in a well-lit environment, but the best way to save battery light is to set it continually low. Remember that you’ll always be able to turn up the brightness of your phone display whenever you need to.

 

Set up your phone’s automatic lock

In order to ensure that your phone isn’t working unnecessarily, they will stay lit for a specified amount of time after using it, and by changing this time down to 30 seconds before it locks or times-out will help you to save all important battery power. It’s known as Auto-lock for iPhones and Screen Timeout for Android.

 

Turn off your vibrate setting

Your phone’s vibrate setting uses a lot of your battery power by making your phone move every time you get calls, texts and notifications. By switching off your vibrating setting and choosing to use a ringtone instead, you can save yourself lots of valuable battery power.

 

Keep your background dark

White and light displays on your phone always require more battery power than dark colours and black, so choosing a dark screensaver and background image is an incredibly easy way to save battery life. Additionally, dynamic – or animated – screensavers may look great but they’re a black hole for your battery life, so we recommend sticking to a static image instead.

 

Make sure you’re actually closing your apps

Our smartphones are perfect for today’s busy lifestyle and make multitasking far easier than it’s ever been, and we can switch between apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Maps in less than a second if we need to. Despite this, one consequence of such convenience is that it’s all too easy to forget to close down apps once we’re not using them.

By not properly closing your apps, you’re leaving them to run in the background, and your battery has to work extra hard to power them all. Once you start properly closing your apps once you’re no longer using them, you’ll see your battery power improve (as well as your data potentially lasting longer!).

However, you can also unnecessarily lose battery power if you keep closing an app, only to open it again as your phone will be working harder than it needs to. If you’re in the middle of using a messaging, for instance, you’ll save the most battery power by keeping it open until you’re finished with the conversation.

 

Turn down the volume

Turning down your volume level by one notch is enough to have a real effect on the life of your battery – essential if you receive a lot of calls throughout the day. Additionally, going into your settings and changing them so your messages and sound alerts don’t give off a sounds will help to save you battery life.

 

Switch off your screen notifications

If you really want to save battery life, you should think about switching off your screen alerts, as well as silencing them. Notifications wake your screen up throughout the day which means that your screen is being regularly lit up, maybe far more than you realise.

If it’s not essential, turning off your screen alerts will help you get to the end of the day still able to use your phone.

 

Stop your social media notifications

Social media sites have the ability to sap away vast amounts of phone battery, aided by the constant notifications we get from them throughout the day. Like your other notifications, you may not even see them throughout your working day, meaning they’re taking completely unnecessary battery power.

As long as you don’t need to know exactly when there’s activity on your social media accounts, turning off your social media notifications will help to save you a lot of battery.

 

Switch off your Bluetooth and GPS

GPS and Bluetooth are two features on your phone that are extremely intensive on your battery, so you can save yourself a lot of power by only switching either of them on when you need them and switching them back off when you’re finished with them.

Save even more battery by screenshotting your Google Maps journey and using that whilst finding your way, turning your GPS off straight away.

 

Disconnect your Wi-Fi

If you’re connected to a home or work network, it’s easy and convenient to let your Wi-Fi keep on running in the background whilst you save your data. Despite this, unless you’re going to be connected to Wi-Fi for a long time, it’s actually better to use your data.

Once you’ve left your hotspot, your phone will be constantly putting all its effort into reconnecting to a network, sapping lots of battery power. You can help your phone to last a lot longer by switching off your Wi-Fi as soon as you leave your hotspot.

 

Don’t use voice controls

S Voice and Siri are lots of fun to use, and can be useful if we have our hands full, but they require a lot of battery power. Even mistakenly activating voice controls once requires a lot of power, so one easy way to make your battery last longer is to disable your voice controls.

 

Say no to automatic app updates

iPhones now automatically update all your apps when a new version is released, and they’re often released more often than people recognise. This is hugely convenient for usability but it can leave you with far less battery than you need to get through the day. You can easily disable automatic updates by going to your Settings> iTunes & App Store > Automatic Downloads > Updates > Turn Off.

 

Turn off your camera flash

Modern smartphones combine the camera flash and the torch function, the light is so powerful. Camera flashes are useful in lighting up otherwise dark photos, but they use up a lot of battery power, and a dead battery is the last thing anyone wants on a night out.

Take your photos without the flash setting and use one of the many great, free image editing apps to lighten them up the next day before posting to your social media accounts.

 

Turn on Flight Mode

Flight mode is available on most modern devices, smartphones included and works to temporarily disable signal transmissions. This means that your phone can save huge amounts of battery power for when you really needs it, so if you won’t be able to look at your phone for a few hours, this is a great way to save power.

 

Say good-by to Google and hello to Blackl!

When you need to search the internet but still need to save battery, simply switch from Google to Blackl. Blackl is powered by Google, but uses a black background, rather than a white one. As mentioned above, black and dark backgrounds are far more battery friendly than bright and white colours, so this is an easy and practical way to help you until you can next charge your phone.

 

Switch off your background app updates

Once again relevant to iPhone users, some apps will update themselves in the background, ready for when you next want to use them. Unless you need your apps to be constantly up to date as soon as possible, switching off the Background App Refresh in your settings is a simple way to keep your phone alive for as long as possible.

 

Running low on power? Turn off your 4G

Double your remaining battery life simply by turning off your 4G. Unless you really need a fast data connection when your battery’s low, switch it down to 3G as soon as you reach 20%.

 

In the red zone? Switch off your 3G

If you’re in the red danger zone and still aren’t anywhere you can charge your phone, you can prevent it dying on you by switching of your data. It does mean that you won’t be able to access your apps if they require an internet connection to function, but you’ll still be able to send and receive text messages and calls.

 

 

Here at Battery Experts, we’re here to provide you with an unrivalled level of knowledge about your batteries, along with excellent customer service, a great range of high quality products you can rely on. Based in Durban, we’re the one-stop shop for batteries in South Africa and no matter where you’re based, we’re here to help you choose the best battery for your needs.

To find out more about our long lasting batteries to make your life easier, call us today on 0861 44 78 44 or get in touch online