We all know the uneasy feeling of being out and about and noticing that our mobile phone battery has dwindled to an uncomfortably low amount. Every beep, buzz, and ring becomes a jarring reminder of the diminishing power, causing anxiety that intensifies with each passing minute. If you don’t have a handy power bank with you, fear not! There are some power-saving tricks that can keep you connected to the digital realm until you can find a power source. Keep reading to find out how to make your phone battery last longer.
Nothing sucks the life out of your battery more than your screen’s brightness. It takes a lot of juice to keep your device screen illuminated, and if you’re running errands and going back and forth between indoor and outdoor lighting, constantly changing your brightness settings can drain your battery even more. So how can you make your phone battery last longer? Use your phone’s auto-brightness adjustment feature. It automatically detects lighting conditions through the camera sensor and adjusts the brightness accordingly.
Turning your phone to low-power mode is a way to make your phone battery last longer. When your phone is in low-power mode, it isn’t running on all cylinders, requiring less power. Low-power mode will dim the brightness on your phone, run tasks less often, and revert to 4G, all of which will save battery power.
Nickel and lithium-ion batteries discharge quicker when the phone is warmer. If you’re doing processor-intensive tasks, it’s better to do so in air conditioning. Keeping your battery from overheating helps to extend its long-term health, too. Regular overheating diminishes the battery capacity so you may not get the typical 2-3 years of life if your phone regularly stays hot.
If you’re facing a long day away from the phone charger and don’t need location services, you should disable your GPS feature to help preserve your phone’s battery life. A lot of GPS tracking devices and apps use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and notifications, which consume power even when not in use. If you turn off these features, you’ll save battery life.
Every app has a push notification. While they can sometimes be helpful, most just alert you to things you really didn’t want or need to know. Not only can they annoy you, but they can also drain your phone’s battery. When push notifications are enabled, your phone constantly scans that app for updates so it knows when to send a notification. So even if you haven’t received a new e-mail lately, your e-mail app is constantly demanding attention from your battery. Disable push notifications from any apps you don’t absolutely need a play-by-play from, especially those that get frequent updates.
Dark mode is a setting on your mobile phone that has light-colored text on a dark screen. So how does this make a phone battery last longer? If your phone screen has an OLED or AMOLED display, it can extend the battery life because it uses less power to display darker colors than lighter ones. This is because black has fewer pixels to power.
Sometimes you’ve tried every solution and your mobile phone still gets close to dying on you. Running a mobile diagnostic test can help identify problems with the battery itself, or processor issues with the phone that affect the battery life. It can also point out user patterns that lead to overly fast battery discharge. Besides auto-brightness, temperature control, and turning off push notifications, you may want to try closing out apps that are running in the background but are not being used.
