13 Tips to Extend Your Smartphone Battery Life

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Team in Mobile

These days, smartphones like iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S and Blackberry can be seen everywhere. The reason to own a smartphone is obvious, it has a wide range of capabilities and functionalities to perform almost any tasks you can imagine. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps available on the Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play.

While we enjoy the ease and convenience the smartphones bring to us, they seem to have one common drawback: short battery life. Most of the smartphones’ battery can only last for 1 or 2 days, and it’s obviously insufficient. While engineers are still exploring new ways to improve both the battery life and battery lifespan, we should acquaint ourselves with some basic battery-saving knowledge. Here are 13 proven and effective tips you can use to save and prolong your smartphone’s battery.

If you know of any other battery-saving tips, share with us in the comments below.

Keep Your Smartphone Out of the Sun
One of the most important tips to make your smartphone battery last longer is to avoid your phone being placed under the sun or left inside the hot car. Such heated environment will not only cause the battery charge to be used up easily, but also shorten its lifespan.

Install the Latest Operating System
Your smartphone’s operating system, be it iOS, Android, RIM or Windows Phone is one of the key factors affecting the battery performance. If your phone is running the old version of software which contains bugs, it may cause the battery to drain overnight, even without any use. So always update your phone to the latest version of software to get rid of battery bugs (if any). Who knows that the updated software can make your phone’s battery last longer?

Lower the Screen Brightness
It’s a common sense that battery life can be extended by dimming the screen brightness. Depending on the lighting condition, if the screen brightness is set too low or too high it can be harmful to your eyes. The best way to address this issue is to turn on your phone’s Auto-Brightness feature. It will adjust the brightness according to changing lighting environment to make sure your eyes are comfortable when looking at the screen.

Use Ringtones Instead of Vibrations
Unless you’re in the cinema, library or other silent places, otherwise it will be good to use ringtone as a notification for any incoming calls and messages. This is because vibrations tend to use more power than ringtones.

Disable Application Notifications
Another effective way to converse battery is to turn off application notifications. Applications like instant messaging apps that heavily depend on immediate notifications can drain out your battery pretty fast. To save your battery, go to notification center to turn off unnecessary apps’ notifications.

Turn off “Push New Data” Feature
If you don’t need to regularly check your email messages from the accounts like Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail, you can actually disable the Push feature to conserve battery. With the Push set to off, all your messages will be received based on “Fetch New Data” settings depending how often you want it to check your emails. It can be every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly or even manually.

Set “Fetch New Data” Manually or Less Frequently
Similar to Push, “Fetch New Data” can be the reason why your battery drains out fast. Your mail accounts and applications might be set to fetch data too frequently such as every 15 minutes. To save your battery power, set the Fetch feature to the specific intervals based on your actual needs. You can even fetch new data manually if you want to.

Turn On “Location Services” Feature Only When Needed
Location Services is another feature that can affect your battery performance. Maps and Compass are some of the applications that actively use the feature. If you don’t use these apps regularly, turn off the “Location Services” to conserve battery life. Alternatively, you can control which apps to have access to this feature.

Turn Off 3G/4G Network, WiFi and Bluetooth When They Are Not in Use
One of the best ways to save your phone battery is to turn off 3G/4G network, Bluetooth and WiFi connections when you no longer need to use them. When you’re at the poor reception area with these connections active, your battery will be run out very quickly. This is because your phone keeps on searching to get a good connection and wasting power when switching from one signal to another.

Close the Apps that are Not in Use
Some people like to open many apps at the same time and don’t bother to close them even when they are not in use. This is a bad habit as leaving background apps open will cause your battery drains out fairly quickly.

Auto Lock Your Phone
It will be a good practice to auto-lock your phone, so that whenever your phone is not in use it will be locked and turned off automatically. You can set a specific interval (1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, etc) for the phone to be locked after a period of inactivity. This will save your battery power being wasted.

Turn on Airplane Mode in No Coverage Area
It’s a good practice to turn on Airplane mode when you are at no or low coverage areas. This is because your smartphone always attempts to connect with the cellular network and this consumes battery pretty significantly.

Charge the Battery Regularly
Most of the smartphones are powered by a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery. To maintain the battery’s lifespan, you should charge it regularly regardless of battery level. It helps the electrons in a Lithium-ion battery actively moving around. It’s recommended to perform at least one full charge and discharge cycle (0% to 100% to 0%) every month.