You may not always have an InCharged cell phone charging station around (unless you’re one of the lucky ones) – so how can you save your cell phone battery to make it last longer? A Gizmodo article offers a few helpful suggestions, including even the background color of your screen.
1.Auto-Brightness
The display on your phone is typically responsible for around 50 percent of battery drain – you could manually turn the screen down, but that can make it difficult to read. Auto-brightness uses you phone’s ambient light sensor to set the screen at just the right level so it’s readable but not wasteful.
2. Lower the Time-Out
Another way to save battery is to decrease the amount of time the screen stays active while not in use. Usually the default time is about two minutes, which is much longer than you need.
3. Background Color
This only makes a difference of one or two percent, but using a light colored background uses more power than a dark one.
4. Email
All push notifications tax your battery life because they require constantly being connected to an application’s server, but email is the worst. Instead of having new emails pushed to the server, set your smartphone to fetch emails. Less frequent is better, but any fetch setting is better than having your messages pushed.
5. WiFi and Bluetooth
Having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth searching for a signal all day will can cost you about 15% of your battery. It’s better to use Wi-Fi than data, so stay connected if you have a signal – but don’t waste your battery searching for one.
6. GPS
Obviously you need a GPS for certain applications like Google Maps – but many other applications use your GPS just to serve you local advertisements. Keeping your phone actively searching for satellites drains the battery, so use your phone’s settings to manually choose which applications really need to.
7. Disabling 3/4G
Of course, this dramatically reduces the capabilities of your smartphone – but it can buy you hours of talk time. The 3G or 4G receivers in smartphones take a lot more battery life than older cellular signals, so relying instead on voice-only signals takes much less power.
8. Take Care of Your Battery
Try to keep the battery between 40 and 80%, and try to keep your phone out of direct heat – it causes the battery’s capacity to decrease astronomically.
9. Disable Background Apps
Most applications stay open until you close them – even if they have been inactive for hours or days. Make sure you periodically close any apps you have running but aren’t using, and on some smartphones you can manually select which applications will use data in the background.
10. Monitor
The best way to know how to optimize your battery life is to know which applications use your battery the most. Android phones will show you this in “Battery,” but for iPhones you will need an application like Battery HD+ .
Source: Gizmodo
