How To: Increase Your Smartphone's Battery Life
Our phones are getting smarter and smaller--that means there's less room for a powerful battery. Here's how to make yours last longer.
Last Longer Between Charges
As Douglas Adams so adeptly put it, “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
“Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Well, as neat as digital watches are, we also have smartphones, which are even neater, but unlike digital watches, we have yet to discover a means of powering them indefinitely. In fact, compared to their predecessors, “dumb” phones, smartphones seem only to have made grand evolutionary leaps backwards in terms of battery life.
In the pre-smartphone era, your cell phone would easily last weeks between charges, while modern smartphones struggle to make it through a single work day. Their current evolutionary path isn’t particularly promising, either. Dual and quad-core processors sure do speed things up, but not without putting extra drain on the battery. The race for the thinnest device isn’t helping either; every millimeter shaved off is space that could have gone toward a larger battery.
There’s always the option to spend upwards of $40 on expanded batteries or denser batteries with higher capacities, but it’s a pricey option. You also have to be wary of dishonest brands that claim higher capacities than their batteries actually offer.
The other option is to learn all of the tips and tricks needed to squeeze every last drop of power efficiency out of your smartphone – the very tips and tricks contained inside this guide.
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