Today I want to talk about how to get the most from your smartphone’s battery.
Ideally, everyone’s phone battery should last a full day. But even my iPhone 13 Pro Max’s big battery can find itself in the red (less than 20%) if I use it more than usual and don’t find time to top off my charge during the day.
I have a phone charger on my bedside table, in my car and on my desk at work, so I’m usually close to a charger. But what if I’m away from my usual charging spots?
What are some things all of us can do to increase battery life when we are running low and charging is not an easy option?
The obvious choice is to not use the phone any more than you must, but let’s look at some settings we can tweak to save power.
The No. 1 drain on your phone’s battery is lighting up the screen. Everyone should know how to turn on auto-brightness or dim their screen manually. Dimming the screen on your phone should be in your phone’s settings under “Display.”
On an iPhone, the auto-brightness can be found via the Accessibility settings under “Display and Text Size.”
You’ll also want to make sure your screen’s auto-lock is set to quickly turn off the screen in a minute if you forget. That should be in the same display setting screen.
Both Android and iOS have presets you can enable to help extend your battery life at the expense of limiting some features.
On an Android phone, look in the Battery settings and enable Power Saving Mode, which makes changes to networking, syncing and location services. It will turn down your screen’s refresh rate.
On iOS, go to Settings, then scroll down to Battery and enable Low Power Mode, which reduces background activity like downloads and mail fetch.
In addition to these settings, according to Google, here are more things you can do to extend battery life:
— Turn off keyboard sounds or vibrations.
— Restrict apps with high battery use.
— Turn on adaptive battery.
— Delete unused accounts.
— Turn on dark theme.
These are all great suggestions. One more I might make is to think about carrying an external battery to provide a portable power boost.