Month: August 2017

One of the most common complaints for all mobile users is the battery never seems to last as long as promised. Just when you need to send that critical email or make that important call, you get an obnoxious low battery warning. If you don’t want to succumb to walking around with an adapter and looking for an outlet to recharge, try some of these tips to prolong your phone’s battery life and combat the biggest causes of cell phone battery life drain.

01 Turn Off Features You Don’t Use, Especially: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS are some of the biggest battery killers on cell phones, because they are constantly looking for possible connections, networks, or information. Turn off these features (look in your phone’s settings) except when you need them to save power. Some phones–for example, Android smartphones, have widgets that offer toggles to quickly turn these features on or off so you can switch on Bluetooth when you’re in the car for hands-free driving or GPS navigation and then turn it off to save your phone’s battery life.

02 Turn on Wi-Fi When You Can Connect to a Wi-Fi Network

Having Wi-Fi on drains your battery–if you’re not using it. But if you’re on a wireless network, it’s much more power-efficient to use Wi-Fi than to use cellular data, so switch to Wi-Fi instead of 3G or 4G when you can, to save your phone’s battery life. (E.g., when you’re at your house, use Wi-Fi but when you aren’t near any Wi-Fi networks, turn Wi-Fi off to keep your phone running longer.)

03 Adjust Your Display Screen Brightness and Screen Timeout

As with laptops and TVs, the screen on your cell phone drains a lot of its battery life. Your phone probably auto-adjusts its brightness level, but if your battery starts dipping to levels that make you anxious, you can adjust the screen brightness even lower to conserve more battery life. If you like, you can go to your phone’s display settings and set the brightness to as low as you are comfortable with. The lower the better for your phone’s battery.

Another setting to look at is the screen timeout. That’s the setting for when your phone’s screen automatically goes to sleep (1 minute, for example or 15 seconds after not getting any input from you). The lower the timeframe, the better the battery life. Adjust to your level of patience.

04 Turn Off Push Notifications and Data-Fetching

One of the conveniences of modern technology is having everything delivered to us instantly, as they happen. Emails, news, the weather, celebrity tweets–we are constantly being updated. Besides being bad for our sanity, the constant data checking keeps our phones from lasting very long. Adjust your data-fetching intervals and push notifications in your phone’s settings and in individual apps themselves (news apps, for example, and social apps are notorious for constantly checking in the background for new information. Set those to checking manually or hourly if you must). If you don’t need to know the second every email comes in, changing your email push notifications to manual can make a huge difference in your phone’s battery life.

05 Don’t Waste Battery Life Searching for a Signal

Your poor phone is dying and it’s trying to find a signal. If you’re in an area with a weak 4G signal, turn the 4G off and go with 3G to extend the battery life. If there’s no cellular coverage at all, turn cellular data off altogether by going into Airplane mode (look in your phone’s settings). Airplane mode will turn the cellular and data radio off but leave Wi-Fi access on, for most devices.

06 Buy Apps Instead of the Free, Ad-Supported Android Versions

If battery life is really important to you and you’re an Android smartphone owner, shelling out a couple of bucks for apps you use may be worth it, since research suggests free, ad-supported apps drain battery life. In one case, 75% of an app’s energy consumption was used just to power the ads! (Yes, even in the case of beloved Angry Birds, only 20% of the app’s energy use may go to actual gameplay.)

07 Keep Your Phone Cool

Heat is the enemy of all batteries, whether your phone’s battery or your laptop’s. You might be able to eke out a bit more life out of your phone if you take it out of a hot case or your pocket, don’t leave it overheating in a hot car, and can manage to find other ways to keep it cool.

Of course, as a last resort, turning your phone off when not in use can also cool it down and conserve the battery.

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Boost battery life: 1. Dim the screen brightness or use auto brightness

You love your smartphone’s large, colourful display, but it’s the battery’s mortal enemy. More than any other component of your phone, the display consumes battery life at a devastating pace. Most phones include an auto-brightness feature that automatically adjusts the screen’s brightness to suit ambient lighting levels.

Boost battery life: 2. Keep the screen timeout short

Under your phone’s display settings menu, you should find an option labeled ‘Screen Timeout’ or something similar. (On an iPhone, look for Auto-Lock in the General settings menu.) This setting controls how long your phone’s screen stays lit after receiving input, such as a tap.

Every second counts here, so set your timeout to the shortest available time. On most Android phones, the minimum is 15 seconds. If your screen timeout is currently set to 2 minutes, consider reducing that figure to 30 seconds or less. On an iPhone, the minimum you can set is 1 minute.

Boost battery life: 3. Turn off Bluetooth

No matter now much you love using Bluetooth with your hands-free headset, your wireless speaker or activity tracker, the extra radio is constantly listening for signals from the outside world. When you aren’t in your car, or when you aren’t playing music wirelessly, turn off the Bluetooth radio. This way, you can add an hour or more to your phone’s battery life.

Boost battery life: 4. Turn off Wi-Fi

As with Bluetooth, your phone’s Wi-Fi radio is a serious battery drainer. While you will at times need to use your home or office Wi-Fi connection rather than 3G or 4G for internet access and other data services, there’s little point in leaving the Wi-Fi radio on when you’re out and about. Toggle it off when you go out the door, and turn it back on only when you plan to use data services within range of your Wi-Fi network. Android users can add the Wi-Fi toggle widget to their home screen to make this a one-tap process, or swipe down from the top of the screen (twice if you have Lollipop.)

In iOS it’s easier than ever to toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off. Simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen to display the Control Centre.

The exception to this rule is for location services, since Wi-Fi can help your phone to obtain a GPS fix using less power (see myths section below).

Boost battery life: 5. Go easy on the location services, and GPS

Another big battery sucker is apps using GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile data for monitoring your location. As a user, you can revoke apps’ access to location services, or set levels (in Android) to determine how much power they use. In Settings > Location, you can choose High accuracy when you need it, or Battery saving when you don’t.

Be smart about what you allow each app to access. Allowing your apps to integrate with your location, camera, or SD card can be convenient but is most often not necessary. Granting too many permissions to an app that never uses them will drain your battery for no benefit.

Boost battery life: 6. Don’t leave apps running in the background

Multitasking – the ability to run more than one app at a time – is a powerful smartphone feature. It can also burn a lot of energy, because every app you run uses a share of your phone’s processor cycles (but this isn’t true of all apps – see the myths section below).

Boost battery life: 7. Don’t use vibrate

Prefer to have your phone alert you to incoming calls by vibrating rather than playing a ringtone? We understand the inclination; unfortunately, vibrating uses much more power than playing a ringtone does. After all, a ringtone only has to make a tiny membrane in your phone’s speaker vibrate enough to produce sound.

In contrast, the vibration motor rotates a small weight to make your whole phone shake. That process takes a lot more power. If you don’t want to be disturbed audibly, consider turning off all notifications and leave the phone in view so you can see when a new call is coming in. This approach is as courteous to your battery as it is to your friends and colleagues.

Boost battery life: 8. Turn off non-essential notifications

It seems as though almost every app now polls the internet in search of updates, news, messages, and other information. When it finds something, the app may chime, light up your screen and display a message, make your LED blink, or do all of the above. All of these things consume energy.

You probably don’t want to turn off notifications about new text messages or missed calls, but turning off superfluous notifications will help your battery last a little longer, and it will eliminate pointless distractions throughout your day.

Boost battery life: 9. Push email

Having your phone constantly check if there’s new email is a waste of power. Instead of allowing email to be pushed to your phone at any time, why not change the setting to fetch mail every so often – maybe 15 or 30 minutes if you don’t need to respond immediately to anyone?

Boost battery life: 10. Power-saving modes

Depending on your phone, you may find the manufacturer has provided power-saving features that go beyond anything available in Android by default. (Apple’s iOS doesn’t have a battery saving mode.)

With so many phones and tablets not supplied with USB chargers these days, it’s possible that your current charger isn’t charging your phone or tablet as fast as it could be. Here’s how to charge your phone or tablet faster, even if it doesn’t support Qualcomm Quick Charge.

You’ve probably noticed that your phone or tablet will charge much slower when it’s connected to a PC or laptop’s USB port than when it is to a mains power adaptor. And you may have noticed your phone will charge faster when connected to the charger that came with your tablet. That’s because different chargers have different power outputs.

While a PC’s USB port is specified at 2.5W for USB 1.0 and 2.0 and 4.5W for USB 3.0 (so always use a USB 3.0 port in preference to USB 1.0 or 2.0 when available), a phone charger might be rated at 5W and a tablet charger 10W, for example.

We calculate the wattage by multiplying the current (the number of amps) and the voltage. So, if your charger is specified at 5V, 1A, it can supply 5W. If it is specified at 5V, 2A it can supply 10W.

How to charge your smartphone or tablet faster: Can I use a phone charger with a tablet; can I use a tablet charger with a phone? 

You can use any USB charger with any phone or tablet, with the only caveat that if there isn’t sufficient power available you may find your device won’t charge – this is often the case with iPads, which will not charge from a PC’s standard USB port.

Note that your device will draw only the power it requires. If you plug a 10W charger into a phone that accepts only 5W, it will still draw just 5W and won’t charge any faster than it would with a lower-specified charger.

However, many phones and most tablets will accept a higher input. Check the spec of your phone and your charger now to see whether you could be benefitting from faster charging.

How to charge your phone or tablet faster: What else can I do? 

Several tips are often bandied around that claim to allow for faster charging. One of those is to remove its case. We’re not convinced by the success of this tip, although you could argue that by avoiding excessive heat build-up you will prolong the life of your device’s battery, allowing it to operate at maximum performance for longer.

Another potentially useful tip, if you can bear to go offline for an hour or two, is to put your phone or tablet either into Flight mode or switch it off during charging. This may charge your device quicker because it isn’t busy doing any other tasks that would otherwise place a drain on the battery.

How to charge your iPad or iPhone faster from a Mac 

This tip is Apple-specific, and applies only to iDevices connected to an Apple Mac or MacBook’s USB port. Whereas Macs with USB 2.0 ports offer 2.5W of power, and those with USB 3.0 ports 4.5W of power, Apple claims that one of those USB 3.0 ports is able to offer 5.5W – which means using this will be comparable to using the 5W charger that came with your iPhone (but not the 10W charger that came with your iPad).

Note that this is possible only when the iDevice is the first Apple device plugged into the computer. If you have an Apple wired keyboard or mouse you will need to remove these, hook up your iPhone or iPad, and then reconnect the keyboard and mouse. This won’t work if you’re running Windows through Boot Camp.

For the most efficient charging from a PC’s USB port, make sure the computer is powered on and the screen is awake. If you’re using a laptop’s USB port, keep it plugged into the mains.

How to charge your phone faster with Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 (& upcoming Quick Charge 3.0)

Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 is a next-gen fast-charging technology for phones and tablets running certain Snapdragon processors. In Qualcomm’s own lab tests, it found a Quick Charge 2.0-enabled device with a 3300mAh battery was able to reach 60 percent capacity in 30 minutes; using a standard 5W phone charger just 12 percent charge was achieved in the same amount of time.

Qualcomm has recently announced Quick Charge 3.0, which will begin appearing in its chips in 2016. That means devices running the Snapdragon 820, 620, 618, 617 and 430 processors will benefit. Quick Charge 3.0 improves charging efficiency and reduces charging time so that 80 percent is possible in just 35 minutes.

In order to use Qualcomm Quick Charge you must use an adaptor that has built-in support for it. That may be the charger that came with your device; we’ve also tried a couple of Quick Charge car chargers (see our Choetech and Tronsmart reviews) and a Quick Charge power bank.

Hydrogen batteries – how hydrogen could charge your iPhone for a week

The alternative to faster charging is to provide batteries that last longer, and hydrogen could be a possible solution. We’ve already reviewed the Upp Fuel Cell power bank, but found it very expensive, big and impractical; now innovators are looking to place that tech inside phones.

Batteries are one of tech’s most boring subjects… until your phone, tablet or laptop dies. Here are our top battery tips and tricks to get the best battery life you can.

While most of us live in fear of a fading phone battery when we’re out and about, we don’t worry too much about that battery’s eventual lifespan (probably between three and five years). But there are ways to keep your battery in tip-top shape for a long and fruitful life.

Batteries do not enjoy eternal life. Most smartphone manufacturers say their devices rate their batteries at 300-500 cycles. Apple claims that its laptop batteries reach 80 percent of their original capacity after 1,000 charges.

After this point batteries aren’t able to hold as much electricity and will power your device for increasingly shorter periods of time. See: Best smartphones

So here’s some tips to extend your battery’s lifespan, be that in an iPhone, Android phone, Windows phone, tablet, or laptop.

The big questions about how to re-charge a battery is whether you should let it run to zero before re-charging to 100 percent. One reason why people are unsure is something they’ve heard of called the battery “memory effect”.

At what percentage should i charge my phone?

The rule with Li-ion batteries is to keep them 50 percent or more most of the time. When it drops below 50 percent top it up a little if you can. A little a few times a day seems to be the optimum to aim for.

But don’t charge it all the way to 100 percent . It won’t be fatal to your battery if you do a full recharge – most of us are forced to do this every now and again in emergencies. But constantly doing a full recharge will shorten the battery’s lifespan.

So a good range to aim for when charging a Li-ion battery is from about 40- to 80 percent in one go. Try not to let the battery drop below 20 percent.

When should I do a full battery charge?

Experts recommend that you do a full zero to 100 percent battery recharge (a “charge cycle”) maybe once a month only. This recalibrates the battery – a bit like restarting your computer, or, for humans, going on holiday! The same goes for laptops, by the way.

Should I charge my phone overnight?

Most modern smartphones are clever enough to stop charging when full, so there isn’t a great risk in leaving your phone charging overnight. But some experts recommend you remove the phone from a case if charging for a long time, as a case could lead to over heating – which Lithium-ion batteries do not like (see below).

Should I use fast charging?

Many Android phones have a feature that allows for fast charging, often referred to as Qualcomm Quick Charge or, in Samsung’s case, Adaptive Fast Charging – there are others.

These phones have special code usually located in a chip known as the Power Management IC (PMIC) that communicates with the charger you are using and requests that it send power at a higher voltage.

The iPhone 6 doesn’t feature fast charging, but its Qualcomm PMIC is smart enough to recognise when you use a higher-amp charger (like the one you get with the iPad), and that’s a good thing because fast charging will heat up that Li-ion battery and cause it increased wear and tear.

For the same reason, you should never leave your phone in a hot car, on the beach or next to the oven. A hot battery will suffer long-term effects on its lifespan. And so will a super-cold one, so don’t leave your device in the freezer or out in the snow.

Can I use any charger?

Where possible use the charger that came with your phone, as it is sure to have the correct rating. Or make sure that a third-party charger is approved by your phone’s manufacturer. Cheap alternatives from Amazon or eBay may harm your phone, and there have been several reported cases of cheap chargers actually catching on fire.

What is battery memory effect?

Battery memory effect is about batteries remembering remaining charge if you don’t let them go all the way to zero too often. So a battery frequently charged from 20- to 80 percent might ‘forget’ about the 40 percent that’s left uncharged (0-20 and 80-100).

Sounds crazy but that’s sort of true – but only for older nickel-based (NiMH and NiCd) batteries, not the lithium-ion batteries in your modern phone.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries don’t suffer the memory effect so you almost need to do the opposite: charge them often but not all the way throughout the day, and don’t let them drop to zero.

Storing battery tips

Don’t leave a Li-ion battery li-ing around too long at 0 percent. Try to leave it at around 40-50 percent.

These batteries drain at about 5-10 percent a month when not in use. If you let the battery discharge completely and leave it uncharged for a long period of time it may eventually become incapable of holding a charge at all (that’s properly dead).

It’s unlikely you’ll leave your smartphone lying in a drawer for very long, but some people do leave their laptop, battery packs or spare batteries unused for long periods of time. So try to keep them all at least half charged.

Li-ion battery constraints go a long way toward explaining why smartphone vendors spend millions on incremental design advantages in a market that’s moving with blinding speed. If you’re trying to figure out what your iPhone 5 — or your next Android device or Windows Phone — is going to look like, here are six things you need to know about smartphone batteries.

1. Battery in a bag

A Li-ion pouch cell is a sealed bag containing carefully layered anode and cathode sheets, separators between them, and — permeating all of these layers — a liquid electrolyte. Although tablet batteries comprise several cells (three in the new iPad), smartphones are generally powered by single cells. Either way, at one end of the battery, a printed circuit board (PCB) is connected to the positive and negative terminals of each cell and provides active protection against short circuits, overcharge, and forced discharge. Li-ion pouch cells tend to be fragile and rely on the smartphone case for protection, and so officially are not user-replaceable.

2. Squeezing in run-time

The energy density of a Li-ion pouch cell determines how much run-time you can pack into a given size (volumetric) or weight (gravimetric). Li-ion technology hit the market in 1991. Since then, processor transistor count has increased more than a thousand-fold, Li-ion energy density only threefold. Denser electronics are what make dazzling features possible, but they draw ever more power. Unfortunately, battery manufacturers are having a harder and harder time increasing energy density. This is why non-replaceable Li-ion pouch batteries are popular with smartphone and tablet designers. Without the protective case needed to make a battery safe for consumers to handle — which does nothing for energy capacity — they are thinner and pack more run-time into a smaller space.

3. The XYZ of cells

Energy density is affected by the thickness and the ratio between width (X) and length (Y) of a Li-ion pouch cell. Volumetric energy density falls off as the pouch gets thinner because the packaging takes up a higher percentage of battery volume. The optimal X-Y ratio arises because when the PCB is installed on the short edge of a narrow battery, there’s more room for the active materials (anode and cathode) that actually store energy. All other things being equal, a narrow, thicker battery will deliver better volumetric energy density than a more square one. (An interesting Apple patent reveals ways to mold batteries in more complex shapes to fit into places like the bezel that are presently impossible to use.)

4. The necessity of keeping cool

Li-ion pouch cells don’t like it hot — a common condition for smartphones, as anyone who’s ever had to wait out the “cool down” message knows. The standard Li-ion chemistry depends on an electrolyte that reacts with residual moisture to create hydrofluoric acid, the most corrosive of all chemical compounds. Like all chemical reactions, this process doubles in speed with every increase in temperature of 10 degrees Celsius. The result is reduced calendar and cycle life: not only does run-time degrade with simple age, but each charge and discharge further reduces it, until the battery just doesn’t last long enough between charges. Worse, Li-ion cells generate heat themselves during charge and discharge: the more power your smartphone calls for or the faster you charge it, the hotter the battery gets.

5. Building a smartphone

Three-layer or “carve-out”? The Motorola Droid Razr line (both Razr and Razr Maxx) is an example of the three-layer approach to smartphone design: screen, circuitry, and battery. The iPhone 4 comprises two layers — screen and electronics — with a space carved out of the PCB for the battery. In either case, a bigger screen means room for a bigger battery. Regardless of the other advantages of each approach, the narrower, thicker battery possible with the carve-out approach will offer higher energy density. In a three-layer approach, it’s also more difficult to shield the battery from components that generate heat and thus shorten battery life.

6. Chemistry: Wild card of the pack

Improvements in Li-ion chemistry may offer dramatic improvements in energy density, giving smartphone designers more choices in the feature vs. run-time battle. There’s a lot of promising research into new active materials and some new solutions already on the market. One of these uses a new Li-imide electrolyte that doesn’t generate hydrofluoric acid and thus delivers a dramatic improvement in thermal stability and battery life. It also permits effectively thinner batteries by eliminating most of the swelling in thickness characteristic of current Li-ion pouch cells over their useful life, which forces designers to sacrifice cavity space to accommodate the swelling.