From the Device Corner: Tips, Tricks, and Apps to Maximize Battery Life

Today’s smartphones are functional marvels. With their robust features and user-intuitive layouts, smartphones have cemented their place in the market as well as in our hearts. However, a shared aggravation unites millions of smartphone users worldwide: the abysmal life of a smartphone battery. Unless you restrict your daily usage, you’re lucky to end your work day without a mad dash to the nearest charger. Fortunately, with a little insight and the right apps, you can outsmart the system and enjoy a single charge, hours longer.

Tips to Boost Your Battery Life:

1. Refrain from using the vibrate mode:  While vibrate mode can be an effective and considerate way to recognize incoming calls, it also uses much more power than a standard ringtone mode. By switching to a ringtone or the silent mode, you’ll conserve your phone’s power.
2. Dim the screen: Your phone’s display consumes battery life at an alarming rate (more so than any other feature!), so dimming it as well as turning off the auto-brightness feature will significantly affect the life of your phone’s battery.
3. Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use: Because both features continually listen for signals from the outside world, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios are both guilty of draining your phone’s battery. By turning these features off while they’re not in use, you can conserve almost an hour of battery life.
4. Reduce your GPS usage: Your phone’s GPS unit is another battery life offender. Similar to the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi notation above, the GPS unit is a radio that works by sending and receiving signals from satellites to triangulate your location. Hundreds of apps work in conjunction with your phone’s GPS unit to, for example, find the nearest Mexican restaurant or locate your friends via Find Friends. However, you have the power to revoke an app’s ability to triangulate, resulting in less battery consumption.
5. Change your auto-sync settings: Many apps (particularly social media ones) automatically pull data for real-time updates, draining your phone’s battery life. We recommend setting your apps to sync only once every hour or two, rather than automatically, to prolong your battery’s charge.
6. Close unwanted apps: It’s no surprise that closing idle apps will save battery life.

Helpful Apps for Android Users

1. Advanced Task Killer is an app that has an auto-kill feature that works to close your apps throughout the day.
2. JuiceDefender is a self-proclaimed ‘battery-manager’ app. It works to mitigate the battery-draining components of your phone.

Helpful Apps for iPhone Users

1. Battery Doctor provides statuses and rankings of the various iPhone battery components.
2. System Status Lite is an app that provides a more general overview of your iPhone system and monitors the elements that affect its battery life.

Source: Gizmodo