These charging tips could keep your phone alive for longer. (Image: Apple/Getty)
Millions of people rely on their smartphones every hour of every day for everything from calls to text, banking to photos, and video streaming to gaming. Our phones are incredible gadgets, but one technology that hasn’t kept up with our demand for screen time is battery life.
Long gone are the days of your Nokia mobile phone that could go more than a week before you need to charge them up. Modern smartphones have much more advanced functionality with bright screens, powerful processors, audio, cameras and dozens of components that all put a strain on their relatively small batteries. It’s a wonder they last a day or more, if you think about it.
Nevertheless, running out of battery midway through a gaming session, train journey, phone call or bank transfer is enough to stress any of us out.
If you want to eke more battery life out of your phone every day, here are five simple tips to do so, whether you use an iPhone or an Android phone.
Turn off auto brightness
One of the biggest drains on battery life is your phone’s display. It needs to be bright so you can see, whether it’s pitch black or glaring sunlight. Smartphones have an automatic brightness setting that means you don’t have to manually adjust it most of the time.
If you turn off automatic brightness, you can save some battery life by keeping your screen’s light a little dimmer than usual. This might mean it’s harder to read in some lights, but you can manually adjust the brightness if so. Turning off automatic brightness will conserve power as the system won’t jack up the light when you go outside, saving you some previous minutes of juice throughout the day.
To do this on an iPhone:
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > toggle off “Auto-Brightness”
On Android:
Settings > Display > toggle off “Adaptive brightness”, or similar wording
Turn on dark mode
The most popular smartphones on the market use OLED screens, which use more power to display white light than dark colours. Every iPhone since the iPhone 12 has had an OLED screen, and most of the best-selling Android phones also use the tech.
That means white screens and menus will use more battery. Turning on your phone’s dark mode switches your phone to display dark or black backgrounds and colours in apps, menus and settings, meaning less white bright pixels are shining, therefore saving battery life.
On iPhone:
Settings > Display & Brightness > select “Dark” under “Appearance”
On Android:
Settings > Display > select “Dark”
Google tells users to switch to Chromebook for longer battery life
Use power saving mode
Both iPhones and Android phones can be used with a power saving mode activated. This doesn’t cut off any essential functions of your phone but changes a few settings under the hood to save battery power.
On iPhone:
Settings > Battery > toggle on “Low Power Mode”
Apple says this “temporarily reduces background activity like downloads and mail fetch until you can fully charge your iPhone.”
Lots of background processes happen on smartphones to bring in new emails to your inbox, messages to messaging apps, downloading new podcasts and other functions. Turning these off helps to conserve power.
If you have a Pro iPhone with Apple’s ProMotion 120hz screen tech, this is turned off on Low Power Mode to conserve battery.
On Android:
Settings > Battery > toggle on “Power saving”
Android phones with power saving turned on limit some network usage, app syncing, and location services. There are more settings switched off too such as the always on display, high refresh rates, background light timer and other modes to ensure battery is lengthened effectively.
Change display settings
Many phones come with settings you can tweak to adjust the displays, particularly on Android phones. But no matter your phone model there are settings you can tweak to prolong battery life. Some of these will be turned off if you use low power mode, but you can adjust them manually in this way if you prefer.
On iPhone:
Settings > Display & Brightness toggle off “True Tone”
This setting adjusts the colour temperature of your screen according to the ambient light. Switching it off should save you some power throughout the day.
If you have a Pro iPhone, you can also limit the refresh rate to 60Hz by going to:
Accessibility > Motion > toggle on “Limit Frame Rate”
On Android, settings differ between phone brands, but head to the Settings app and you will likely be able to decrease the resolution output and turn high refresh rate down (if your phone has this), both of which can help to extend your phone’s battery life.
Change charging settings
Many of the latest smartphones allow you to adjust the charging settings, which may not result in more battery life on one given day, but will very much help to conserve the capacity of your battery over several years.
Phone batteries naturally lose capacity over time as they are recharged and depleted continuously. Unfortunately it’s just the science of it. But you can take steps to put less stress on your phone’s battery and extend its lifetime.
On iPhone:
Settings > Battery > change the “Charging limit”
iPhones have a toggle to decrease the charge limit from 100 percent down five percent increments to 80 percent. You can set this to stop the battery ever charging more than this percentage. This is said to help prolong the battery’s life, though of course if you only ever charge your battery to, say, 80 percent, that’s 20 percent you’re missing out on overall.
If you keep the charge limit at 100 percent, you can do this:
Settings > Battery > Charging > toggle on “Optimised Battery Charging”
This still charges to 100 percent, but keeps the charge at 80 percent until you need to use your phone. This works well if you charge your phone overnight and use an alarm in the Clock app. The phone will hold the charge at 80 percent and then do the last 20 percent closer to your alarm.
Android phones often have more settings. On Samsung phones:
Settings > Battery > Battery protection > toggle it “On”
You can pick between Basic, Adaptive and Maximum for increasing levels of protection against battery degradation over time.
Other Android phones will have similar settings you can adjust.
Although Android phones with fast charging are very convenient, this can often put a lot of strain on the battery over time, so turn off fast charging if you can as it will increase the battery’s life over time.
