While some people are excited to get their new phone for their holiday shopping, here are some tips that you should keep in mind. One of the best improvements to the next iteration of the latest models of a smartphone will be its extended battery life, which supposedly additional hours compared to the older versions of mobile phones. And before you start shopping to get your latest model of smartphone, here are some quick tips to squeeze more life out of them.
- Say No to Automatic App Updates. This feature saves us a tremendous amount of time from having to manually update every single one of our apps. The downside? Yep, you guessed it. It’s a huge drain on our battery life.
- Brightness Matters. Most phones are built with ambient light sensors that make adjustments to the screen’s brightness depending on the environment we’re in as a means of conserving battery life. Another tip related to brightness is simply being mindful of the default brightness setting. The brighter it’s set, the more battery that is being conserved. When you can, adjust it to be dimmer for occasions where you can get by with a dimmer screen. This can be found and changed directly above where you turned off Auto-Brightness.
- Watch out for Wifi and Bluetooth. Trains, planes, hotels and coffee houses are just a few examples of where hotspots await us. While these make it seamless for communicating and working on the go, it can also be sucking the life out of our phones. In cases where you don’t need your phone to be detecting a WiFi connection and Bluetooth as well, keep this features turned off so it isn’t constantly working to pull location data and keeping your phone tapped into the Internet when you don’t need it.
- Don’t Overcharge. Despite what intuition may tell us, charging beyond 100 percent actually doesn’t work in our favor. In fact, can cause our phones to develop unfavorable behavior.
- App usage. If you haven’t yet taken a look at your Settings, under Battery, you may want to and you’ll likely be surprised at what you find. Under “Battery Usage,” you’ll be presented with a detailed breakdown of the apps you use most and which is consuming the highest percentage of your battery, both in the last 24 hours as well as the last four days. If you can’t possibly part with any of your apps, simply limit your use of the ones that are the most draining. Generally speaking, the biggest culprits are apps involved with streaming, browsing, and gaming.