The Do’s and Don’t’s of Prolonging Battery Life on Your Phone

 

Does this drive fear into your heart?

We’ve all been there; you look down at your phone and you’ve only got 16% battery life left. You look back again and it’s at 11%. You scramble for the charger; you know you’ve got an email to send, a facebook status to post and a funny cat video to watch.

As our phones get more and more overloaded with apps and become more of an extension of our bodies it’s inevitable that battery life is a huge issue. So what can you do to extend and prolong the lifespan of your battery? Here’s our do’s and don’ts below:

DO:

• Use the charger that came with your device. Don’t be tempted by the cheap knock-offs, they may be damaging your device in the long run.
• Keep your device charged between 40 and 80% as this will ensure your battery life is healthy and reliable.
• Dim your screen or use auto-brightness, if you don’t need your screen super bright then don’t set it brighter than you need to.
• Turn off notifications for apps you don’t use.
• Enable battery or power saving mode when you can.

DON’T:

• Let your device’s battery drop below 20%. This is the danger zone so make sure you reach for your charger when you see this.
• Charge to full capacity. Sounds counter-intuitive we know, but Lithium-ion batteries that are continuously charged to full capacity will end up having a shorter lifespan so try to avoid leaving your phone on charge all the time.
• Leave your phone in a hot or cold environment. Ambience is key here! Try not to leave your phone in the car on a baking Australian summer day or in freezing conditions.
• Leave Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on constantly, if you don’t need them turn them off.
• Leave apps running in the background, those battery suckers will kill your battery life.
• Use push emails. You can set your emails to be fetched at a specific time rather than showing on your phone when they arrive, saving you some battery life.

And one way I personally found increased my battery life; I did the 4-day Inca Trail hike this year and my phone lasted the ENTIRE trip. How? I simply put Airplane mode on. It’s not like the Inca’s were huge on Wi-Fi so if you don’t need internet access or notifications, this one could be handy even if just for a short period of time.

Give some of these a try and if you have some other great tips you’ve found for prolonging battery life, let us know, we’d love to hear them!