8 Tips to extend your Phone’s Battery Life
Fed up of charging your phone ever so often? Carrying your charger everywhere to the metro, your car or college and workplace? Waiting forever for it to charge? Does your phone take more time charging than it does discharging itself? Well, you’ve come to the right place! It happens more often than not that we’re out for a long day, multi-tasking, listening to music while travelling, using Wifi and GPS powered apps for booking cabs, navigating, ordering food, checking notifications and staying in touch with our friends and family when away from home or responding to office emails. Our smart phone is the source of never-ending information that we swallow every day and with the break-through of Google voice assistant or Siri, it has become our new AI best friend. It possibly knows and infers more about us than any other person in our life. And the result is a battery life that gets devoured at a devastating pace.
Following are some tips to abide by for a longer, more lasting battery life:
1. Use darker wallpaper
While using a white or vibrant colourful wallpaper for home and lock screen, our phones with AMOLED display takes more power to light each pixel up on the screen. Therefore, opting for a darker or applying a black wallpaper and using dark themes on apps really go the extra mile to optimize battery consumption. The idea is to get as many black pixels on the display as possible.
2. Update your applications
We use a multitude of software applications in our phone- from Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Uber, Maps, Swiggy, Zomato, Grofers, Chrome to U torrent and whatnot.
The apps that we often use are at times updated to consume lesser battery life, so we should make sure to keep our apps up-to-date. Even if we configured our phone for automatic updates, some apps do require manual updating; hence, we must make sure that we timely update all our apps- both manually and automatically.
3. Turn off unnecessary hardware radios:
Our phone uses a host of radio hardwares that are constantly working to perceive satellite signals and capture radio frequencies to function like Bluetooth, Wifi, LTE, NFC and location services like GPS. They are our battery’s worst enemies. At times we turn on our GPS while booking a cab, navigating through Google maps or ordering food and often allow our phone to track our location to receive constant updates about the weather and traffic, then forget to turn it off. Sometimes it so happens that we don’t even realise our phones have automatically turned on our GPS radio when using GPS fuelled apps. Thus, when not in use, we should remember to turn off our Bluetooth, Wifi , GPS and other hardware radios that suck the juice out of our battery.
4. Turn off vibration
The inclination to keep our phones on vibrate is completely understandable-as it is less noisier than a ringtone yet enough that we don’t miss out on calls and important messages during a meeting or an important lecture. But we will all be doing our phones a favour by keeping it off vibration. The ERM (Eccentric Rotating Mass) vibration motor in our phones shift a small weight inside to make the whole phone shake. This takes a lot of power, draining our battery life multi-folds. Also it would do us even better to turn off the haptic feedback on our keypad.
5. Dump unnecessary home screen widgets and live wallpapers
Just because they are sitting on the home screen seemingly inactive, doesn’t mean they are not consuming power. This goes for widgets that poll status updates in the background or the ones that just sit there, looking pretty and animated- not to mention the live wallpapers. Try to get rid of them from the home screen if they are not in use to save up on your battery.
6. Keep an eye on signal strength
The loss of battery could also result from poor cell service. In case of weak signal strength or poor cellular network, the phone works harder to latch onto a strong enough signal. This eats up our battery life but there is not much we can do about it except to pop our phone into Airplane mode in case we are in such a location and don’t require data or voice calls.
7. Consult a battery guru
There exists an app known as the Snapdragon Batteryguru powered by Qualcomm- a company that provides some of the best chip sets for our smart phones by the name of Snapdragon. Once downloaded in our phones, the app learns our usage habits and automatically adjusts features on our phone to optimize battery life. Other similar apps that help retain our battery by trimming down on background apps that are left running after multi-tasking and killing tasks that sit idle are- Clean Master and Juice Defender. They may take up a few MBs of your storage but they go a long way in adding fuel to your battery.
8. Do not keep the phone charger plugged in
When the charger of your phone is not in use or we are done with our charging, do not just remove the phone off the jack and leave the charger plugged into the socket with the switch on. This is a common habit as a result of lazy convenience and one that is severely harmful as it overheats and burns the wires and assemblage inside the charging unit and results in malfunctioning of the charger, taking more time for it to charge our phones. Also, we must avoid over-charging our phones as it depletes the quality of our battery.
These are some of the lesser known hacks to conserve your battery from draining quickly. Other obvious solutions are reducing the brightness on your display and screen time out to a minimum, turning -on power-saving mode, turning off animations and upgrading your Android OS to Lollipop, Oreo or Marshmallow that have come up with efficient ways like the Doze mode to take care of your battery life while allowing you to operate your phone like you usually do. Also, a trick that worked wonders for me was switching my old charger to a new one- not a cheap one, but a new one. This enabled my phone to complete charging in much lesser time. Hope that was all you were looking for and more!
