4 Tips to Get a Longer Battery Life on Your Cell Phone

Ever since cellular devices became a part of our everyday lives, people have been frustrated with one thing: cell phone battery life that’s too short for our liking. Regardless of the technological advancements we’ve seen since the advent of the cell phone, such as ever-improving cameras, smartphones, and more, our batteries seem to have failed to keep pace with these advancements.

Most of us would love it if our cell phone battery would last longer. While there are aftermarket solutions, such as battery cases and extended-life batteries, there are also many things we as consumers can do to make our batteries last a little longer. Here’s how to get the most battery life out of every charge. 

1. Turn the brightness down

Phones seem to keep getting bigger as more people begin to stream movies and videos on their phones, as well as take higher-resolution photos. These screens provide a lot of great visualization and are fun to have. However, it takes a lot of power to light up that vibrant, high-resolution screen. So to preserve your battery, turn down the brightness level.

While there’s some conflicting advice about whether or not to employ your phone’s automatic screen brightness adjustment mode, it’s important that you turn the brightness down whenever possible in order to preserve battery. Just by activating your phone’s Power Save mode, your phone screen will automatically dim. Power Save mode isn’t just for those times when you’re running low on battery. It could be valuable to have on all the time.

2. Turn off unneeded transceivers

Every smartphone has multiple transceivers that send and receive signals, which provide useful functions. A transceiver is a device inside your phone that makes it possible for the phone to both make and receive calls, texts, and more. For example, GPS, Bluetooth, LTE and WiFi are all made possible with the help of multiple transceivers. GPS typically drains more power than the others.

There are many situations you may find yourself in where certain transceivers aren’t needed. For example, if you’re on a flight, turning your phone on airplane mode will help you preserve your battery, because you won’t likely be using your phone for much more than listening to music or surfing the internet via in-flight WiFi. The bottom line is, any time you can turn off transceivers you don’t need, you’ll preserve your battery.

3. Pare down your notifications

If you have your phone set to send you notifications about every new email, tweet, snap, like, or message, you might be draining your battery unnecessarily. While it’s convenient to have these notifications pop up any time there’s a breaking news story or post from a close friend on social media, your battery does pay the price.

To save power, change the settings on these apps from auto notification to manual. This means you will have to specifically check each app for updates. It sounds tedious. The payoff, however, is a significantly longer battery life.

While it might not be worth your while to set all your apps to manual notification (or no notification), turning some notifications off can be beneficial to both your battery and your sanity. However, your team at work may not appreciate it if you fail to respond to Slack messages in a timely manner. The important thing to do is strike a balance. You probably don’t need to immediately see every football score or each bit of political news. So cut down notifications and save power.

4. Treat your battery well

All cell phone batteries gradually lose their capacity to hold a full charge. Unfortunately, the “powers that be” in charge of technological advancements have yet to find a way to combat this issue. However, you can slow this capacity loss by taking good care of your battery.

One of the most important things you can do to care for your battery is to avoid high heat. Heat damages all batteries. Take special care not to leave your phone in very hot places, such as in direct sunlight on a hot day, or in your car during the summer.

Additionally, if possible, never let your battery fully discharge. If you’re under 5% charge remaining, turn your phone off until you can connect to a charger.

Finally, don’t worry about leaving your phone connected to the charger after the battery reaches 100%. The battery will not get overcharged or otherwise damaged when left connected to the charger.

Did you know that a cell signal booster can also help preserve your battery charge? It’s true! Constantly searching for signal is very power-intensive and can quickly drain your battery. Click below to see cell signal boosters that can help improve battery life.