Smartphone Battery Life: 4 Simple Tips To Extend Battery Endurance

Smartphone battery life is the bane of nearly everyone’s existence. Here’s some ways to eke out even more daily battery life from your phone.

How Do I? covers the basics, because we’ve all got to start somewhere.

Smartphones have genuinely changed the way the world works, arguably maybe more so than any other technology innovation of the past couple of decades. Trust me, I was there.

However, a smartphone with no power is just a fancy glass, metal and plastic brick, and it’s all but inevitable that you’ll face a phone with a fading battery at some point.

I’ve already written about how I test mobile phone batteries – and the limitations of those approaches – but this led to a flurry of questions headed my way about how one might maximise their battery life.

It’s a good question, and I’ll detail some simple ways for most users to extend their smartphone battery life, but first… some bad news.

Smartphone Battery Life: The Bad News

Current smartphone battery technology has its limitations, and a big one is the way that the chemistry of battery composition ages over time. It’s not like fine wine, to put it simply.

There are other factors that can make a smartphone battery conk out faster, including heavy usage or in some cases faulty construction (why hello Samsung Galaxy Note7!), but the one that hits every single phone, no matter what, is time.

The older your phone is, the less battery power it will have even if you’ve only used it sparingly. In fact, even if you took out a new-to-you-shrinkwrapped phone that was built a few years ago out of its box, it would already have some battery degradation due to the internal chemistry changes that happen over time.

This is important, because if you’re simply struck with the observation that your phone doesn’t last as long as it used to, that’s most likely because just like human beings, time also defeats smartphone batteries in the end. In some cases, the only way to make the “most” out of your smartphone’s battery might be to opt for a battery replacement if it’s available – and maybe a new smartphone if it’s not.

This is true for feature phones too, by the way, just in case you’re thinking that a simpler form factor or removable battery makes you immune from the ravages of time.

If you do want your phone’s battery endurance to last longer over time, setting it to charge only to 80-90% can have some small positive effects, and some models do include that as a feature.

Using wired rather than wireless charging may also have a small effect on battery longevity, simply because wired connections don’t tend to heat up phones quite as much as wireless ones do – and heat isn’t great for the battery chemistry in your phone either.

Now, on with the battery life saving tips!

Smartphone Battery Life Tip 1: Manage your screen!

Your phone’s display is one of the big culprits when it comes to battery rundown, and there’s a couple of ways that you can alter your usage to lower your overall power usage.

Firstly, try dimming the display; on most phones (iOS or Android) that’s most easily achieved by sliding down the notification panel from the top (or top right) and sliding the brightness (typically a sun icon) downwards. On some models if they have adaptive brightness you may need to disable that to avoid having your brightness fire up again in the phone’s display settings.

There’s obviously a fine line to tread here, because you don’t want your phone screen to be so dim as to be completely unreadable, but this is a simple way to slightly lower your power usage.

It’s also worth having a look at your phone’s display settings options, and specifically around details like how long it’s set to run before automatically locking the screen, and indeed what (if any) always-on display settings it offers. Setting it to more rapidly lock and dim the screen and minimising use of lock screen widgets can also help boost your phone’s battery longevity.

The other aspect of screen usage that it’s worth considering – though this isn’t true for every phone model – is whether it’s got a variable refresh rate, and what that’s currently set to. A number of Android phones – and a much smaller cohort of iPhones – support higher refresh rates of 120Hz, which leads to a smoother screen experience. It looks lovely… but it can have a serious effect on overall battery life. Setting a phone with a high refresh rate option to a fixed 60Hz can lead to lower power consumption.

However, there is again another catch, or at least a potential catch. Different manufacturers offer differing options here, with some only offering a “dynamic” setting (or similar) or 120Hz fixed option, which may mean that for some content it’ll flow back up to 120Hz anyway.

For phones with LTPO (Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide) displays capable of running dynamically from as little as 1Hz up to 120Hz, you’re likely to be better off leaving it at the dynamic setting to get the battery saving benefits of those lower refresh rates. Some experimentation is good here to work out the best balance for your needs.

Smartphone Battery Life Tip 2: Manage your radios!

OK, not this kind of radio — but I am talking about radio waves, ultimately, so it totally still counts.

Your smartphone (or feature phone) can do everything it does because it utilises a bunch of different wireless technologies for communication functions, and each and every one of these uses power even when you might not be using your phone.

Now, if you need all the functions of your phone all of the time, then you’ll just have to put up with the battery bill as a result, but the chances are that you can probably make do without some of them some of the time, especially if you’re just trying to make it to the end of the day.

So which services are these, and how do you disable them?

Bluetooth is a relatively low-power technology (especially for certain Bluetooth Low Energy gadgets) used for wirelessly connecting to devices quite close to your phone; we’re talking smart watches and headphones for most users.

Also read:

What are the differences between each version of Bluetooth? (Reviews.Org)

If you’re not using Bluetooth headphones and don’t have a smartwatch or fitness tracker, disabling Bluetooth can save you some power. You can typically do this from your phone’s Bluetooth settings menu, or via the Bluetooth icon on most phone’s slide-down notification blind.

I think everyone knows what Wi-Fi is, but it’s worth keeping in mind that if you’re out and about and not connected to your home or work Wi-Fi on your phone, it’s still expending energy looking for Wi-Fi networks on the not unreasonable basis that you might want to connect to nearby networks.

If that’s not the case – or again if you for other reasons such as security only want to use your mobile data connection – then disabling Wi-Fi can reduce your phone’s power requirements.

Your phone’s calling and mobile data connections also use up power too, so you could potentially disable those if (for example) you were only going to use your device on a Wi-Fi connection. The larger downside to doing so is that it would disable your actual calling ability as well, which most people don’t want.

Except if you do; if your usage on your phone was only going to be absolutely based on apps or data already on the device, then the nuclear option here is to throw your phone into Airplane mode, disabling all onboard radios in one fell swoop.

If you’ve ever wondered why your phone’s battery always seems to last a little longer in-flight, this is why – because Airplane mode cuts back on how much radio calling out to the outside world it even tries to do.

Smartphone Battery Life Tip 3: Manage your apps!

The other factor that affects smartphone battery life is your app usage. It’s logical enough as a consequence, because the more you use your phone, the more the battery runs down.

The reality here is that some apps are more power hungry than others, and in some cases, some apps can outright misbehave, slurping up electrons even if you’re not using them.

So how can you tell? Most phones will let you see which apps are the biggest battery hogs if you dive into the settings and then battery section of settings whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android device.

Once you’ve identified your power-hungry apps, you may have some hard choices to make – or maybe some easy ones. If your app usage is for must-use apps – I’m not going to judge whether that’s a productivity app, a game or anything else, that’s up to you – then you may have to accept that using those apps is going to drain your battery away, but if it’s for an app you’re not using much, or one that’s rather silently draining your battery in the background even though you forgot you’d installed it at all, then kick it to the kerb by uninstalling it.

It’s well worth identifying your app battery burners too, because it can happen that an app misbehaves and chews up more battery power than it should. It’s worth checking in that case if there’s an update to that app that might fix the issue.

Sometimes a reboot of your phone can fix that, and sometimes it can’t. Speaking anecdotally a while back, I had serious issues with Google Maps absolutely killing the battery on a phone I was using as my daily driver, and only uninstalling and reinstalling the app managed to get it to behave again.

Smartphone Battery Life Tip 4: Manage yourself!

The final aspect of smartphone battery life optimisation to consider is… well, it’s you.

How many times do you check your phone each day, and why?

It gets a bit into the lies, damned lies and statistics field for my tastes, but there is a lot of research that suggests that a lot of Australians are constantly on their phones, if only checking for notifications and email updates and the like. Depending on who you want to believe, that could be as often as once per minute.

I’d be a screaming hypocrite if I didn’t admit that I’ve been guilty of over-checking my phone from time to time. We’ve all been in those situations where we’re waiting for an urgent message, or we’re in a bored moment, so may as well check the incoming mail and social media feeds, right?

The issue here of course is that the more you use your phone and tell it to check for new data, or just fire up the display to look at what’s come in while you weren’t looking a whole sixty seconds ago, you’re draining the battery, while also developing a habit in your brain that nags you to check your phone, which then affects your phone’s battery life… and so on it goes!

It can be hard to break the habit, but if you limit your smartphone usage over time, whether that’s simply putting it out of reach, or declaring you’ve only got so many idle usage minutes per hour (or any other measure that suits you) before you have to ignore it, you can make it last a whole lot longer than if you’re checking your phone every few minutes.

Also, while I am a huge technology nerd (you knew that, right?), the reality is that there is a whole big wide wonderful world out there beyond your smartphone screen. Looking up every once in a while isn’t just good for your smartphone’s battery life — it’s also good for you.

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