By Dave Johnson | CBS MoneyWatch – Wed,
Jul 17, 2013 5:45 PM EDT
We're a smartphone society now --
people do everything on their phones, from checking e-mail and Facebook posts
to watching video and surfing the Web. All that comes at a price, though: bear
attacks and woefully short battery life.
While there's little I can do about
the bears, I can offer a near-dozen practical tips for extending the battery
life of your phone, which reduces the frequency of charges (and hopefully let's
you make it home at the end of the day before the juice runs dry).
Adjust the screen brightness. The default setting for your screen is probably brighter
than it needs to be, and the display is the single largest consumer of battery
power on your phone. Turn it down to the lowest level that still comfortable to
see.
Sleep sooner. Your phone lets you specify how quickly to turn off the
display and put the phone to sleep. You can extend the life of your phone
significantly by ensuring the phone turns itself off quickly rather than
staying on for several minutes every time you check the time.
Turn off notifications. Many apps enable display notifications. Most of the time,
these are pointless and a waste of battery power since they force your screen
to light up briefly many times throughout the day. Disable apps' notifications
to extend battery power.
Disable any antennas not in use. Never (or only rarely) use Bluetooth. Make sure it's turned
off in your settings. The same is true of Wi-Fi, though if you're like most
people, you probably use that quite a bit. If your battery is near death,
though, and you need to keep it alive as long as possible, you can enter
Airplane Mode (which turns off all the radios, including voice).
Minimize the gadgets your phone
syncs with. The new Pebble smartwatch is great,
but it imposes a battery penalty on your phone to the tune of about 10 percent
of battery life per day. There are also Bluetooth headsets, your car and other
high-tech conveniences that consume power. If you want to maximize battery
life, minimize the number of gadgets you connect to.
Say no to location requests. Many apps ask permission to detect your location so they
can provide more targeted information. That might be useful, but every time an
app has to ping your GPS chip, it uses power. Unless you really need that
location function, just say no.
Sync less frequently. Most smartphones are designed to check for e-mail and apps
data every 15 or 30 minutes. If you can live with less frequent updates, extend
those minutes to a full hour. This will have a noticeable effect on battery
life.
Lower the volume. Turn down your phone's overall volume, including the
ringer.
Turn off vibrate. You might need this feature -- especially if you leave your
phone in your pocket all the time -- but making a mechanical vibrator jiggle
takes a lot of juice. Turn it off for more runtime.
Keep it cool. A hot battery drains faster than a cool one -- so if your
phone is hot to the touch, it's running inefficiently. That can happen when you
leave it in your car, in your pocket or on top of another hot gadget, like a
laptop. Running the phone continuously can also make it heat up.
Turn it off completely. If you know you won't use your phone for a while -- like in
a meeting or at the movie theater -- shut it off rather than just quieting the
ringer.