Whether you’re just getting into smartphones or if you’ve had one for a while, you can’t deny that the battery life that you get out of a smart phone is nothing like what you got from your old non-smart phone (dumb phone?). Here are some tips on how you can improve your battery life:
1. Understand your battery
Most smartphones these days use a lithium-type battery (Li-ion or Li-polymer usually). If you’ve had a Ni-Cd (nickel-cadmium) or NiMH (nickel metal-hydride) battery in the past, you’re probably in the habit of draining the battery completely before recharging it. Lithium-type batteries do not like this. In a perfect Li-battery world, they are at 100% all the time. This is obviously not feasible in the real world, but if you have a desk-charger at work or a charger in your car, keep your phone plugged in. Many smartphones also charge off USB power, so even if you don’t have a charger at work, having your phone’s USB cable plugged into your desktop or laptop computer should charge it too.
Having said that, it’s a good idea to run a full charge cycle once every one or two months in order to re-calibrate the battery. This resets the battery’s thresholds for ‘full’ and ’empty’ so that it can correctly monitor and report its charge level to the phone’s operating system.
The optimal operating temperature for a Li-type battery is between 0° and 35°C. So even your pocket may be a bit too warm for your phone. Certainly avoid leaving your phone in your glove box or in a warm car – electronic parts last longer if they’re not exposed to the extremes of temperature anyway, so be nice to your phone and keep it cool.
2. Understand your phone
The typical high-end smartphone has quite a few radios built into it. You can control how these are used and use a lot less power in the process.
The cellular radio – which you use to make and receive calls (and send/receive text messages) – can be switched into 2G mode rather than 3G if all you ever do is talk and text. 3G is great for internet browsing and data, but if you don’t do any of that stuff all it does is drain your battery. Real-world tests have shown that you can double your talk time by running on 2G rather than 3G.
Bluetooth is great for connecting to your car or wireless headset, but if you’re not using it there isn’t much point in keeping it on. Turning off the Bluetooth radio in this instance will save a bit of power.
Wifi is another consumer of power, although if it’s connected and being used in favour of a 3G data connection it’s a bit more efficient. However if it isn’t connected to a Wifi network you may as well turn it off. All it’s doing is scanning for Wifi networks to connect to, which consumes a fair bit of battery power.
The biggest power consumer by far would have to be GPS (if you have it). It’s certainly not a setting I’d keep on all the time, as it easily reduces my own phone’s standby time from 2 days to under 4 hours. Many phones also do a good-enough job of locating you using a 3G triangulation without the aid of GPS, so I only use my GPS receiver for navigation and not much else.
There are other smart phone behaviours that you can change in order to make better use of your battery power:
Turning off push notification is a big battery saver. If you don’t need to be notified of an email, facebook update or tweet as soon as it happens, turn off push notification – it’s usually a setting within the application itself. The application normally allows you to set a frequency for checking if you don’t want push notification, and there’s almost always a non-push frequency that will keep you in touch without draining your battery.
Finally, most smartphones have an ambient brightness detector that allows the phone to automatically adjust the brightness of your phone’s screen (which is a heavy power user). Using this automatic adjustment saves the phone using a heavy back light load when it’s unnecessary. If you’re not convinced that this is giving you good results, you could always use a lower constant brightness setting. It rarely impinges on usability and is easily changeable on most phones, so that if you do need a temporary brightness boost it isn’t a drama to change.
The location of all of these settings can be found in your user manual. I won’t list any here, because there are far too many to list. If you have any other tricks that you’ve discovered over time, feel free to leave a comment. 🙂