The battery life of your smartphone is often a key consideration when choosing which smartphone to go for, especially if you’re a heavy phone user and you need your phone 24/7. Another way to make the most of your smartphone battery is to adjust your phone settings to get some extra life out of it between charges. Check out our tips for preserving your smartphone battery below.
Look at the Biggest Drains on your Battery
One of the most useful things you can do is to check the apps which are heavy on battery use. You may want to consider deleting some of them permanently if you don’t use them or you can simply give the most battery-gobbling apps a miss if you’re trying to eke more from a low-ish battery to get you through the rest of the day. You should be able to find all the information you need in the Battery part of your Settings menu.
Turn off Vibrations and Sounds
It may be obvious but if your current phone settings mean that your handset is vibrating or emitting sounds for every email, text and social media notification you get then your battery will drain a lot quicker. If you can get by without them then it’s worth switching them off even if it’s just for certain periods during the day.
Screen Brightness
Smartphone screens can eat up a fair bit of your battery charge. It’s worth adjusting the screen time to the shortest time frame before it goes to sleep as well as turning down the screen brightness to around half of the maximum. The new Android Lollipop operating system has an Auto Brightness option – turn this off to improve your battery efficiency.
Battery Saving Mode
Most smartphones have a battery saving mode which automatically kicks in when the battery dips below a specific level of charge. Make sure this is enabled on your handset, it does mean that certain functions will be turned off until you charge your smartphone but it can give you a reasonable amount of time of essential use.
Bluetooth and NFC
Both of these functions can eat up valuable battery charge so it’s well worth turning them off if you don’t need to use them and just switching them back on again when you do. Your Bluetooth and NFC settings can usually be found in the Wireless and Networks menu.
GPS and Location Tracking
You’d be surprised at how many search engines, social media apps and of course Mapping apps use GPS and Location Tracking. You may have already checked boxes where its ask you to save your preference when you’ve used them previously. To get more from your battery, these also need to be turned off and can be found in the Location menu which should be sub-menu of the main Settings menu.
