How to Maximize Battery Life On Your Smartphone

What’s more frustrating than a dead phone? That question likely gave you pause, and you’re not the only one. You’re probably familiar with the sense of panic that sets in when you see your phone battery sink into the red zone as it lowers past 10 per cent. But here’s the good news: regular daily use doesn’t have to literally suck the life out of your smartphone. And while we’ve already covered fundamental tips like adjusting your screen brightness, there are a variety of additional methods to better manage your phone’s battery life cycle. Simply employ a few of these tricks to ensure your phone lasts through a day’s worth of texting, web browsing and photo snapping.

Kill those vibes

While it seems most of us leave our phones on vibrate these days, this setting is actually a real battery killer. It sucks more life from your smartphone to vibrate for calls and notifications than it does to let it ring.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution: try to keep your phone out of vibration mode. Unless you need that added awareness for an important incoming call or text, switch off vibration (or you can go into your phone’s settings and turn down the vibration strength as well — even this can make a difference in terms of battery life).

Also, do you know that cool buzzing/vibrating that happens when you punch out texts on your phone’s keyboard? That’s known as haptic feedback, which again, uses much-needed juice on your smartphone. When nixing your phone’s vibration mode, turn off the haptic feedback feature as well. While the function may have a mild cool factor, you likely won’t miss it too much.

Turn off unused radios

While this is a bit more advanced than simply switching off vibration mode or adjusting your screen brightness, this trick addresses some seriously power-sapping features. Newer smartphones tend to be loaded up with hardware functionality like GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth specifically. And while these features can make our lives more convenient in a variety of ways, they also zap your smartphone’s battery.

So instead of leaving these life-sucking features on 24 hours a day, simply delve into your phone’s settings and switch them off until you need them. Then just sit back and enjoy the almost-instantaneous boost in battery life.

Take advantage of power-saving mode

Depending on your smartphone model and the operating system version it runs, you may have a built-in power-saving mode that automatically enables many of the previously mentioned functions to extend time between charging sessions. So dig through your phone’s settings and take advantage of this function.

For example, Android’s Lollipop operating system comes equipped with an aptly named Battery Saver mode which can be enabled in the “Battery” section on your phone’s “Settings.” You can even determine when you want this special mode to kick in (i.e. you can set it to automatically engage when your phone hits 15 per cent battery life).

The bottom line

We all fight the battle of maintaining our smartphone’s battery life. However, the aforementioned arsenal of helpful hints can help you win the war against drained phones and maintain a smartphone that’s always ready for action.

Do you have any other tricks for boosting your smartphone’s battery life? Share your advice in the comments section below.