5 Tips to Extend your Smartphone’s Battery Life

Apart from keeping a powerbank handy whenever you’re away from a power outlet, there are other ways to keep your smartphone running for a longer period of time. In this section, we list down five easy steps that you can do to extend the mileage of your device’s battery.

Manually adjust the screen brightness – One of the most power-hungry components in today’s smartphones is its display, especially if yours is equipped with a big and pixel-packed screen usually associated with a flagship device. Although we can’t really do much about the size and resolution that it comes with, we can control the brightness to extend the mileage of our battery.

In most situations, 10-25% brightness should be more than enough for a comfortable viewing experience when you’re indoors. It can be a little tricky using your phone with that brightness level outdoors, but if you’re indoors most of the time, lowering the brightness should give you at least an hour or more of juice.

Disable mobile data – Next to the display, the component that sucks the most life out of your smartphone’s battery is its mobile data chip. You can totally disable the mobile data connection for maximum battery savings or set the highest connection speed to 2G so you’ll still benefit from increased battery life while still having internet connection.

Background data – Most apps that are installed on your device are designed to automatically use your phone’s internet connection to check for updates and fetch fresh feeds.

This is good in most cases, but if you’re looking to extend the mileage of your battery, you may want to filter which apps checks for new updates and fetch new feeds from time to time. You can do so by following the steps below for your specific device:

Android: Settings > Data Usage > Select apps from the list > Then choose “Restrict background data”

iOS: Settings > General > Background Data App Refresh > Then Select which apps you want to use background data.

Windows Phone 8: Settings > Swipe to the Right to access Applications > Background Tasks.

Vibrate or Ringtone – Ideally keeping both vibrate and ringtone on make it easier for you to notice new app notifications, SMS and voice calls. But if you really want to preserve every drop of juice from your battery, it’s better to just keep one of them turned on.

While we’re in the vibrate topic, it’s been widely-publicized that enabling the vibrate feature for keypresses and notifications do consume more battery than when it’s disabled. So in dire battery situations, it’s best to disable this feature and just use ringtone for notifications and keypresses.

Turn off GPS – GPS is helpful for locating your destination or adding geo-tags to your snaps, but leaving it on all the time can take its toll on your smartphone’s power resources. That being said, turning the GPS off when not need can nominally extend your battery life.

There are other ways to extend the mileage of your smartphone’s battery but these five tips should be a good starting point. Feel free to share other helpful tips on the comments field below.

Carl and Louie contributed to this post.