How To: Increase Your Smartphone's Battery Life

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.

  • fb39ca4
    or, for ios, you can just use springboardsettings -you can toggle stuff while still in an app.
    Reply
  • virtualban
    Project the image directly to the retina for a smaller display and consumption. Or better, tap into the optical nerve and transmit the image directly there.

    - uncalled for -
    I'm going to patent these ideas, even though many people had these in the past, and will allow everybody to use the ideas for free, except apple, who has to pay me, or die.
    Reply
  • quantumrand
    fb39ca4or, for ios, you can just use springboardsettings -you can toggle stuff while still in an app.
    That is a good option, and there are a lot of other apps that can do this as well, but they all require that you jailbreak your iPhone first.
    Reply
  • Thanks for including BlackBerry OS7 phones.... no wonder the brand is dying... people won't even include them in generic non-partisan articles!
    Reply
  • cookoy
    i find turning on flight mode saves a lot of juice. But my boss and my wife aren't particularly happy if i do this.
    Reply
  • quantumrand
    Matt CThanks for including BlackBerry OS7 phones.... no wonder the brand is dying... people won't even include them in generic non-partisan articles!
    There isn't a ton you can do on a BlackBerry to save battery life. Their smaller screens and lower performance processors make for a pretty long battery life to begin with. You can still apply several of the concepts mentioned in the article to a BlackBerry, like training the battery, toggling WiFi/Data, and changing pull/push settings for things like e-mail.
    Reply
  • jgutz2006
    "last longer between charges" thought that might be some sort of male sexual innuendo...
    Reply
  • techy74
    Good article. We all love our smart phones. We dont all love how spend half their life on the charger.
    Reply