Category: BATTERY

Make your laptop battery last all day

We’re all at the mercy of the battery packs inside our smartphones and laptops. Once these batteries die, our lives get put on hold until we can find somewhere to plug in again. So battery life estimates are one of the first specs a lot of us look for when choosing a new device.

You don’t want to spend all day worrying about when you’ll next be able to charge up your laptop, so take some proactive action to limit the drain on its battery. With the right operating system tweaks and customizations, plus some good habits, you can go longer than ever without being shackled to a wall outlet.

Adjust screen settings

One of the biggest draws on your laptop’s battery is that bright, high-resolution display. Anything you do to ease that strain will have a beneficial effect on the length of your battery’s life.

Start with brightness: Dial down the brightness of the screen as much as you can without straining your eyes, using whatever keyboard shortcuts your laptop offers. You can make more detailed modifications by opening up System then Display in Windows Settings or Displays in System Preferences on macOS.

In addition, screens that time out sooner use up less battery life. To set this, and a bunch of other power-saving options, choose Power & sleep inside the System section of Settings on Windows or Energy Saver from System Preferences on macOS.

The other settings available on the same screens let you put the hard drives to “sleep” (which means they take longer to wake back up, but use less power), put USB devices into a low power mode, and more. These tweaks won’t make a major difference, but you can eke out some extra battery life by enabling them. If you’re on Windows, there’s a special Battery saver mode available which maximizes the time you get between battery charges. To find it, click the battery icon on the taskbar.

Reduce your workload

The harder your laptop is working, the faster your battery will drain. Which is why, when you’re away from a power source, you should close down any programs hanging around in the background that you’re not actually using. If your laptop runs fewer applications, and avoids demanding programs (think games and video editors), its battery should take longer to drain.

Meanwhile, the browser is a bigger battery sucker than you might think. Resist the temptation to have dozens of browser tabs open at once, and your laptop’s battery will thank you. And when you’re browsing, avoid video streaming sites. They typically demand a lot of battery life, both because they keep the screen constantly active, and because they require a decent amount of processing power.

Audio makes a difference too. Active speakers blaring out music will use up more battery power than silence—or a pair of plugged-in headphones. If you can, turn down the volume or do without the sound altogether.

Maintaining Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections also uses up battery power, albeit a pretty small amount. If you can disconnect your laptop and work offline—and do without a wireless mouse and other peripherals—you’ll get a little bit more battery life as a result. We’re not talking major improvements, but you might just make it to the end of the day.

Keep that battery healthy

Lithium-ion batteries degrade naturally over time, but treat your laptop battery right, and you’ll enjoy better battery life for longer. Avoiding environments that are too hot or too cold is a good start, as batteries don’t like temperature extremes, which wear them down more quickly.

Demanding applications on your computer can generate that heat your battery needs to avoid. Which brings us back to the idea of sticking to lightweight tasks and programs while you’re away from a power source. If you really have to have a gaming session or encode some video, consider using a laptop cooler to dissipate the heat more effectively, and keep your laptop battery running for longer.

There’s an ongoing debate within tech circles over the “healthiest” approach to recharging batteries. The most up-to-date advice suggests that shallow discharges and recharges are preferable in the long-term, rather than allowing your battery to drain completely each time—although you should still do a full discharge about once a month. Unplugging your laptop once it’s fully charged, rather than leaving it always plugged in, tends to be better for your battery’s health as well.

Finally, if you won’t be using your laptop for a while, Apple and others recommend leaving the battery with a 50 percent charge in it—leaving it fully charged or fully discharged for an extended period of time can permanently damage it.

Top 10 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

There’s nothing good about running out of juice when you’re trying to get stuff done, and being unable to find a plug to recharge your battery in the meantime. If you work on the go at all, here are some easy tips to extend the life of your laptop’s battery, both in a pinch and before you leave the house.

  1. Tweak Your Built-In Power Saving Options

First, the easy fix: Get familiar with your laptop’s power management features. In Windows, it’s “Power Options,” which you can bring up by hitting Start and typing just that. In macOS, it’s in System Preferences under Energy Saver. Don’t overlook these, and don’t assume that the defaults are designed to save you juice. If you know you’ll be out and about with your laptop, tell your laptop to sip power as lightly as possible before you leave, so you don’t have to scale back what you’re doing after you’re already out.

  1. Use Your Laptop Manufacturer’s Battery Maintenance Tools

Depending on the manufacturer of your laptop, they may include or offer battery maintenance tools that can tell you a lot about the health of your battery, along with their recommendations to extend its maximum life. For example, Sony and Lenovo both have tweaked battery maintenance panels, or their own utilities, depending on the version of Windows you’re using.

  1. Grab a Battery Monitor for Deeper Insights on Charges, Cycles, and Remaining Life

If your manufacturer doesn’t have a specific battery maintenance tool—or you wiped it away in your last clean install or PC de-crapifying, all isn’t lost. There are a number of free utilities that can tell you everything you want to know about your laptop’s battery, no matter who made it (that includes you, MacBook owners.)

  1. Keep the Brightness Down When You’re On the Go

If you’re out and about already, looking at a battery that may not make it to the next outlet you’ll have access to, the first thing you can do is to cut power to your laptop’s biggest power sink: the screen. Obviously when your laptop isn’t in use, it’ll be sleeping, but when it is in use, you can save some juice by keeping the screen brightness as low possible (while still being usable, of course.) If you have a Windows machine, you may even consider disabling adaptive brightness and controlling it yourself.

  1. Keep It Cool

Heat is a battery killer, and it doesn’t just kill its short term life, it’ll shorten your battery’s long-term health as well.We’ve mentioned this before on several occasions, but it helps to keep your laptop as cool as possible, or at least avoid restricting airflow when you’re using it on the go. Grab a lap desk, keep the back elevated a bit if the fans are on the bottom, and avoid crowding the sides or back.

  1. Avoid Full Discharges

We’re not going to wade into or settle the debate over whether it’s healthy or unhealthy for a battery to allow it to discharge completely and then charge it back up again—that’s for another day. However, one thing is for certain—most batteries do have a finite number of charge cycles, after which their efficiency is sorely depleted.

  1. Kill Power-Hungry Apps and Processes

Along with minimizing the brightness of your laptop’s display, another tweak that’ll save you energy both before you’re low and when you are low is to kill any power-hungry apps or tools that run in the background while you work. It’s another old tip, back from the days when you could have tons of background processes sucking down power—more than today, really—but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

  1. Kill Power-Hungry Hardware, Too

As well as power-hungry applications, if you’re trying to squeeze as much possible battery life from your gear while you’re on the go, it helps to turn off any unnecessary hardware or features as well. Now would be a good time to disable Wi-Fi unless you need it, or Bluetooth for that matter. Don’t go crazy disabling every little hardware feature you have just to score a little more time, but if you’re out and about and don’t need some of those power-hungry features, certainly turn them off.

  1. Use Hibernate, not Just Sleep, Whenever Possible

You may be tempted to just shut your laptop’s screen every time it’s not in use to save as much battery as you can, and that’s a good idea if you’ll open it again later, but if you can, use hibernate instead. The difference is simple—in hibernate, your laptop isn’t using power at all, while during sleep it’s still sipping power, just much much less.

  1. Kill Those Tabs, or Try a Different Browser

This one might be a non-starter for many people, but your web browser is likely the most power-hungry app or tool you use, and more than a few browser developers know it. First, if you’re the type with a billion tabs open all the time, get familiar with how to manage them easily, or try an add-on like The Great Suspender, which can unload them from memory when not in use—which also saves your battery.

6 Tips for Longer Laptop Battery Life

We’ve all been there. You’re in a meeting, or on the road, or in a classroom, and you find, to your horror, that your laptop is nearly dead. Maybe you forgot your power adapter, maybe there isn’t an available outlet. For whatever reason, your battery power is dwindling, and you still have stuff to get done. Hope is not lost, however. There are some things you can do to buy more time on that almost-dead battery so you can meet a deadline or respond to an important email before it’s too late.

Some of these techniques are for when you need to stretch your battery at that very moment, while others are preventative measures, best implemented before your battery life comes up short. There is some of overlap between the short- and long-term strategies we’ll outline below, but even when the actions are the same, the reasons behind them may be different.

Short-Term Battery-Stretching Strategies

If you’re in a tough spot right now, there are things you can do to extend the battery life immediately. None of these actions will actually increase the amount of power left in the battery, but instead will reduce the amount of power the laptop is using, letting you squeeze in a few more precious minutes before the battery goes kaput. The name of the game in these instances is power consumption, and you need to reduce yours to as little as possible.

  1. Activate Your Laptop’s Battery Saver or Eco Mode

Designed with these sorts of circumstances in mind, most Battery Saver or Eco modes will engage a number of automatic changes to lengthen usable battery life—many of the same changes we’ll be making here. This saved profile will adjust your laptop’s settings and shift components into low-power states to help you ration your remaining juice a bit longer.

Once you’ve turned on the automatic battery-saver tool, there are still plenty of steps to take to eke out even better efficiency. This is done by turning off unnecessary devices, adjusting settings to reduce power consumption, shutting down unwanted apps and processes, and adjusting your activities to use less power.

  1. Disable Unused Devices and Ports

The easiest way to reduce power consumption is to simply turn stuff off. Every component in your laptop needs power to function, but that doesn’t mean you need to power all of those components all of the time. Start by disconnecting any unneeded peripherals (like a USB mouse or external drive) and turning off the biggest power hogs, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, graphics processors, and unused optical drives.

WARNING: Before disabling any component or device, make sure that the device is not in use, and that it is not essential to continuing operation of the laptop. For example, you do not want to disable the hard drive that houses the operating system, or the processor the runs the entire laptop. Only disable those devices you are comfortable turning off.

To disable unused devices on a Windows system, open up your system’s Control Panel and find the Device Manager. In the Device Manager, individual components are grouped by category. For example, Network Adapters will often include both the LAN adapter, which provides Ethernet connectivity, and Wi-Fi, for wireless networking.

The four standard candidates for saving power are the graphics card (found under Display Adapters), the optical drive (found under DVD/CD-ROM Drives), and the Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters (under Network Adapters). Find the device you want to shut down within the relevant category. Right click on the device name, and select “Disable” from the drop down menu.

While you’re in the Device Manager, you can also turn off any unused ports. Just like an extension cord left plugged into an outlet, these unused plugs still have power going through them, and losing some in the process. The actual impact on battery life will be minimal, but if you’re desperate for another minute or two of life, this will help. Take a quick glance at your ports, and turn off anything that’s not being used, like USB ports with nothing connected to them.

While you can disable USB ports on a Mac using the terminal program, it’s something that IT administrators would use to lock down Macs for security purposes. We don’t recommend doing it as an end user because it may make your system act up. You can, however, disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi from the Menu bar at the top of the screen.

  1. Adjust Your Settings

While you’ll still have to use the display and the keyboard, you can adjust the settings for each to reduce power consumption. One often overlooked power drain is keyboard backlighting. Unless you’re in the dark and need the backlight just to make out each key, turn off the backlight entirely. You can typically assign a hotkey for this function.

The next power drain is your screen. While you obviously need to keep it up and running to use the laptop, you don’t necessarily need it running at maximum brightness or resolution. Many laptops will have hotkeys for increasing and decreasing the screen brightness, but if not, it can be adjusted in the control panel. Reducing the display to 50 percent when you’re running on battery power can add a significant amount of time.

Additionally, if you’re simply typing up a document, you don’t need all of the detail offered by a 1080p or higher display. Dialing down the screen resolution to a basic 1,366-by-768 resolution or lower reduces the amount of power used in graphics processing without negatively impacting your ability to work, letting your laptop hang on a bit longer.

Finally, turn off or turn down the sound. If you need to hear, drop the sound down as low as you can, and consider switching from the laptop’s larger speakers to a set of tiny earbuds to get the audio piped right to your ears. Whenever possible, just mute the laptop altogether. That way, the speakers won’t be getting any power, and you’ll buy yourself some more precious time.

  1. Turn Off Apps and Processes

It’s not just the hardware that’s stealing your battery juice. Multiple apps and processes running on your system will also chew through battery life more quickly. As with the hardware, start by turning off anything that isn’t being used.

In Windows, start by taking a look in your system tray, the collection of icons in the lower-right corner of the desktop, next to the clock. On the left end of the System Tray, select the icon to display hidden icons. Take note of which apps are running in the background.

Open up the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or use Ctrl+Alt+Del and select Task Manager from the menu. Once in the Task Manager, look at the open apps—you may find that a program or two have been left running simply because you forgot to close a window instead of minimizing it.

Next, go to the Processes tab. This shows you what processes are currently running on your machine. While some of these are needed, some, like those associated with music and video players or cloud storage services (like Dropbox or Google Drive) can be disabled without causing any problems.

For MacBooks, the process is a little different. Take a look at System Preferences > Users&Groups for a menu called Login Items. Delete any power-hungry programs that you don’t need anymore, or disable things like Google Chrome’s automatic launch at startup. You can also see programs that are using a lot of power at any given moment by holding down the Option key and clicking on the battery indicator in the Menu bar. Alternately, you can open the Activity Monitor utility to see a list of all the programs and processes you currently have open , and which of these are using the most power. You can stop these processes by selecting the program and then clicking the Stop icon. Power Nap is an Apple OS X feature that checks your email and twitter feeds for activity while the system is asleep. If you are trying to maximize battery life, it would be wise to turn off that feature.

  1. Simplify

You can also stretch your battery life by simplifying your own activities. Multitasking is nice when you have full power, but running several programs at once puts a greater load on the processor and draws more power. Adjust your computer use by sticking to one application at a time and avoiding resource-intensive programs.

Start by single-tasking—if you need to type up a document, close any additional programs. You’ll get longer battery life by not running Spotify in the background. If you need to keep some tunes going, switch from streaming media to locally stored songs—you’ll still be using some extra power to play them, but streaming media over Wi-Fi also uses the laptop’s wireless radio.

You might also benefit from switching to simpler tools for the same tasks, like typing in a basic text editor rather than using Microsoft Word. It may have fewer features and none of Word’s automatic actions (like Spell Check and Autosave), but you can do all the writing you need without using quite so much power. Some applications you’ll want to avoid entirely, like photo and video editing tools, which place a significant load on the processor and graphics card, and are real power hogs.

By eliminating unnecessary power uses, you should be able to extend the life of your battery in those moments that you find yourself high and dry.

Long-Term Strategies

These tweaks will help turn your system into a lean, mean energy-efficient machine, adding to both the useful time you get out of a single charge, and extending the overall life span of the battery.

  1. Care and Feeding of Batteries

It starts with taking care of the battery itself. If your system has a removable battery, take care not to damage the battery contacts. They connect the laptop to the battery, and if the contacts get dirty or damaged, it can reduce and disrupt the flow of power. You can clean the contacts with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol, but damaged contacts might need to be professionally repaired. This doesn’t apply to laptops that seal the battery into the chassis.

You may have heard old tips about charging your battery to only 80 percent, and not leaving it on the charger all the time, but most of that advice is outdated, and applies to older nickel metal hydride batteries but not the lithium ion and lithium-polymer batteries used today. While modern laptop batteries don’t require you to be as conscientious about how and when you charge your battery, you should occasionally take the opportunity to let the battery drain completely through normal use.

Finally, keep things cool. Heat will shorten the long-term life of the battery, so take steps to provide optimal airflow and cooling. The biggest problems come from physical obstruction of the ventilation ports. Dust buildup is one problem, which you can take care of by cleaning the laptop’s vents and fan. A can of compressed air can be used to blow out some of the dust. The more frequent issue that crops up is using the laptop on a pillow or blanket, which can both obstruct the ventilation fan and retain the heat coming off of the system. This can be avoided by only using your laptop on surfaces like a table or desk, and a lapdesk will make a big difference when using a laptop in bed.

How to protect your phone from low battery?

A survey shows that people feel anxious and nervous when their phones have low battery.This week Banggood offers 4 ways to get rid of Low-battery anxiety.

1.Use the Good-quality charger & charger cable

A good-quality charger & cables not only enable to fast charging but also protect your phone.

2.Solar charging can help you in outdoor

The Solar chargers don’t have built-in batteries, but they are more effective at converting solar energy to power. If you are going to clamp or other outdoor activity, the solar charger might be more suitable for you than the normal power bank for these reasons:1.It’s more portable 2.It can work sustainably as long as there is the sunshine.

3.Car Charger

A car charger is used to keep your phone juiced up when you are on the road.One function Car Charger shares the advantage of safety performance and top-level charging effect, compared to the multi function ones.

Tips for Car Charging：It’s better to start your car before your phone charging.Becuase the huge current at the car starting moment might have an impact on your phone.

4.Power bank

It’s hard to deny that a power bank is an incredible thing that saves us from the nervous and panic of low battery.There’s a massive selection on offer, catering for every need.

There are 2 tips for choosing a nice power bank from our product manager:

1.Check the brand and source of the cell.

2.Be careful to a small-size power bank with a large capacity.

HOW TO CHARGE YOUR ANDROID PHONE BATTERY FASTER

We’ve all done it: you’re getting ready to leave the house and you realize you’ve forgotten to charge your phone. Its battery level is perilously low, but you have 15 minutes to spare, so you plug it into its charger to give the battery a boost – and it gains a measly two percent. How do you avoid this in future? Read our guide on how to charge your Android battery faster.

Get the right plug and charger

While Android chargers have a universal fitting, that doesn’t mean they’re all the same. Connecting your charging cable to a laptop is a bad idea if you want to charge your phone quickly: a USB 2.0 port chucks out just 2.5 watts of power, while USB 3 delivers 4.5 watts. Your wall charger will deliver much more, so this is the best bet if you want the speediest charging.

Many modern Android phones support fast charging, which delivers a whopping 15 watts and can therefore charge your phone much more quickly. You’ll find a good list of fast charging phones on the Qualcomm website (you don’t need to have a Qualcomm processor; just Qualcomm’s power system).

Be aware that just because a phone supports fast charging, it doesn’t mean the charger that came with it is a fast charger. You may have to buy your own. For example, the LG G4 is compatible with fast charging but the stock charger isn’t a fast charger.

You don’t necessarily need to buy your phone maker’s own charger – a third party one can save you a fortune – but be wary of no-name gray market cheapies, which have a tendency to set things on fire.

Put it into airplane mode

The less your phone is trying do while it’s charging, the more quickly it will recharge. Airplane mode blocks any wireless radios on your device, reducing your phone’s capabilities and therefore stopping it from doing so much.

It won’t receive calls or messages while it’s in airplane mode, but it’s worth it to have a device that will stay on for the next few hours.

Turn it off

Turning your phone off completely will allow it to recharge even faster than putting it in airplane mode. Again, you might miss out on a few notifications while it is off, but you’ll have to live with that if you want your phone to last until you come home again.

Use a battery-saving mode

Every Android Lollipop device has a battery saving mode of some description, whether it’s the stock option or a manufacturer-specific feature such as Motorola’s Doze. Switch this on to conserve power while your phone recharges.

Switch off unnecessary features

Check to see if you have any unnecessary features on, such as Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi or NFC, which could be using up battery power. Close all your apps and stop your phone from doing automatic backups or updating apps from the Google Play Store.

Don’t touch it

If you need your phone on and out of airplane mode while it’s charging, because you are expecting an important call, try not to keep using your phone every 30 seconds. Why? Because the screen is the biggest battery drainer of them all.

The more you wake your phone, the faster its battery will drain. So try to avoid the urge to check every notification that comes through, leave it to charge, and it will reach the desired level much faster.

Buy a portable USB charger

This won’t actually charge your phone faster, but it will solve the problem of having a low battery and not enough time to fully charge it. Portable USB chargers come in small, lightweight packages and often can be picked up for less than US$20.

HOW TO CALIBRATE THE BATTERY ON YOUR ANDROID PHONE OR TABLET

Battery problems are among the biggest concerns for smartphone users, which is why we offer so many useful tips for solving battery drain issues. If you notice that your battery performance and duration has decreased, it could be time to calibrate your battery.

How do I know whether my battery is the problem?

First of all, you need to identify why your battery performance has decreased: is it the Android system’s calibration or the battery itself? We’ll move onto calibration in the sections below, but you should check if your battery itself is damaged first.

If your phone has a removable battery cover, turn off your phone, remove the cover and inspect the battery. Look for bulges or leaks. In the image below, you’ll see what a normal battery looks like next to a swollen one. If your phone doesn’t sit flat on the table anymore, that could also be a sign of a swollen battery too.

What is calibrating a battery?

The Android operating system has a feature called Battery Stats, which keeps track of battery capacity, when it is full or empty. The problem is that it sometimes becomes corrupted and starts displaying data that isn’t real, which, for example, causes the phone to turn off before it reaches 0 percent. Calibrating your Android battery simply means getting the Android OS to correct this information so it is reflective of your actual battery levels once again.

It’s important to understand that you can’t actually calibrate the battery itself: it is, after all, just a cell that stores power and discharges. However, lithium-ion batteries do include a printed circuit board (PCB), which serves as a protection switch to stop them exploding or deep discharging.

How to calibrate an Android device battery without root access

The old ‘fully charge and discharge’ approach stands as one of the simplest ways to ‘recalibrate’ your Android battery. We’ve warned you in the past about low voltage problems in lithium batteries and the negative impacts of fully draining a battery on its lifespan and the same holds true here. But, if your phone battery is causing you real problems, it’s worth taking the risk.

Method 1

  1. Discharge your phone fully until it turns itself off.
  2. Turn it on again and let it turn itself off.
  3. Plug your phone into a charger and, without turning it on, let it charge until the on-screen or LED indicator says 100 percent.
  4. Unplug your charger.
  5. Turn your phone on. It’s likely that the battery indicator won’t say 100 percent, so plug the charger back in (leave your phone on) and continue charging until it says 100 percent on-screen as well.
  6. Unplug your phone and restart it. If it doesn’t say 100 percent, plug the charger back in until it says 100 percent on screen.
  7. Repeat this cycle until it says 100 percent (or as close as you think it’s going to get) when you start it up without it being plugged in.
  8. Now, let your battery discharge all the way down to 0 percent and let your phone turn off again.
  9. Fully charge the battery one more time without interruption and you should have reset the Android system’s battery percentage.

Remember that it is not recommended to perform this process regularly. Even when your battery is so dead your phone won’t even turn on, your battery still has enough reserve charge to avoid system damage. But you don’t want to poke the tiger with a stick. Perform this process once every three months at the most. If it is required more often than that, you have bigger problems at hand.

Put plainly: fully discharging a battery is bad for it. Trying to overload a battery is also bad for it. The good news is that charging batteries will shut off automatically when they’ve reached their safe limit and there’s always a little in reserve even if your phone won’t start. Again: only do this when really necessary, because it does have a negative impact on battery life.

How to calibrate an Android device battery with root access

Even though I’m not convinced that clearing the batterystats.bin file has any meaningful effect on how the Android system reports remaining battery charge, there are those who swear by this method.

So in the interest of fairness, we’ve included the process for you here (it is true that different manufacturers use the batterystats.bin file for different things). It’s basically the same process as above, but with the added step of using a root-enabled app.

Method 2

  1. Discharge your phone fully until it turns itself off.
  2. Turn it on and let it turn off again.
  3. Plug your phone into a charger and, without turning it on, let it charge until the on-screen or LED indicator says 100 percent.
  4. Unplug your charger.
  5. Turn your phone on. It’s likely that the battery indicator won’t say 100 percent, so plug the charger back in (leave your phone on) and continue charging until it says 100 percent on the screen as well.
  6. Unplug your phone and restart it. If it doesn’t say 100 percent, plug the charger back in until it says 100 percent on screen.
  7. You want to repeat this cycle until it says 100 percent (or as close as you think it’s going to get) when you start it up without it being plugged in.
  8. Now, install the Battery Calibration app, and before you launch it, make sure your battery is at 100 percent again, then restart.
  9. Immediately launch the app and recalibrate your battery.
  10. Once you’ve calibrated your battery, discharge it all the way down to 0 percent and let your phone turn off again.
  11. Fully charge the battery one more time without interruption while it’s switched off, and the Android system’s battery percentage will be reset.

That’s it. Have you tried any of these methods? Do you know an alternate way to fix battery problems? Let us know in the comments.

Apple is ‘looking into’ why some iPhone 8 batteries are swelling

Apple seems to have an iPhone 8 battery problem on its hands, and it’s not clear yet whether it’s occurring in just a handful of edge cases or in a larger batch of phones.

Over the past week, reports have been coming out about iPhone 8s that have split apart either on arrival or after several days of use. What appears to be happening is that the battery inside the phone is swelling, bending the front of the phone and separating it from the body of the device. So far, there haven’t been any fires — just ruined phones.

Apple has a short statement on the matter: “We are aware and looking into it.”

The first report came out of Taiwan, where a woman is said to have found her iPhone swollen apart after plugging it in to charge. Someone in Japan then posted photos of a split-apart phone on Twitter. And in the days since, there’ve been cases in China, Canada, and Greece.

There appear to be only six or so reports so far — certainly less than a dozen that have been publicly identified — so the issue seems to be quite small in comparison to the millions of phones that Apple has likely already sold. In any manufacturing run that big, there are going to be occasional issues, so on some level seeing a few broken iPhones is expected.

But after Samsung’s Note 7 fiasco, there’s reason to be concerned about what’s happening here — especially since it’s a battery issue. Batteries shouldn’t be swelling in any number, and it’s not clear what the half-dozen iPhones that are having this problem have in common. While it seems to be rare, there’s obviously good reason to want to know what’s going on.

“[Swelling is] very unusual for a brand-new battery and leads toward the direction of there’s something fundamentally wrong with this battery,” says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors, in a phone call with The Verge. Jaffe, a battery industry analyst, says manufacturers have reached a limit with lithium-ion battery capacity and could end up producing designs with a bigger risk of short circuiting in an attempt to store more power.

For now, he says, it’s too early to know what’s happening with Apple’s phones. “It could be just a random distribution,” he says. “Just a random event, and it’s only a few.”

Jaffe suspects Apple’s executives are “in crisis mode” over the potential damage that battery issues could lead to. But while we’ve seen a few swollen batteries already, he says, it doesn’t mean the problem will necessarily elevate into a Note 7-style crisis with phones starting to produce smoke.

“Swelling is always a precursor when there is a battery fire, but the percentage of actual fires are pretty rare,” Jaffe says. “In the Galaxy Note case, there were probably a couple hundred battery failures of one sort or another, but there were only a handful of fires — so that gives you a sense of the proportion of actual fires.”

7 SIMPLE TIPS TO SPEED UP YOUR PHONE

Your Android phone was probably fast when you first bought it, right? Then over time it began running more slowly. This is a common problem and nothing to worry about. Below is our guide to getting your phone fast again. Read on for our best tips to speed up your phone.

  1. Identify the problem

The first thing to do is find out what is causing the problem: an app, multiple apps, the system itself? Trepn Profiler by Qualcomm will show you the real-time CPU load for individual cores, an overview of network traffic for both data and Wi-Fi, GPU loads and RAM usage and more.

Trepn can also produce app-specific or system-wide profiles and contains various methods for displaying accumulated data. You can save your profiled data for offline viewing and analysis and even have performance overlays on running apps. Once you’ve figured out your specific issue, you can move on to the solutions below.

  1. Free up some space

All those photos you’ve taken and all of those apps you’ve installed can take their toll on your phone. It needs a little breathing room to run smoothly and if it’s running low on space, it can start to slow down.

You can check how much space you have left by heading to the Storage section of Settings. One of the easiest ways to free up space is to tap Applications and see which apps you can uninstall.

Tap the entry for an app you no longer need and then tap Uninstall. You can repeat this process as many times as necessary for any apps you feel you can live without.

There are other ways you can free up space. The files you have downloaded are probably still sitting in storage wasting space and can be removed. In Storage, tap Downloads, select the files you want to remove and then tap the Bin button.

Many of the apps you have installed use data caches in an attempt to speed up operations. This is effective up to a point, but if you are running short of space, it can actually be counter-productive. To free up this space, hit the Clear cached data option and then tap OK to confirm.

More files ripe for deletion can be found in the Miscellaneous files section. Tick the boxes next to any types of file you’d like to remove – backups, files received via Bluetooth, playlist files, and so on – and then tap the bin button. You can keep an eye on how much space you have freed up when you look at the Available space section.

You can also disable any apps that came pre-loaded on your phone but you don’t use. If you have rooted your Android, you can actually get rid of these apps, but if not, you can go to the app properties and disable it to prevent it from running and using up your phone’s resources.

  1. Cut back on the widgets

All those widgets you have running on your home screen may be useful, but they also take up their fair share of resources.

If you have any widgets running that you don’t really need, consider disabling them. There’s no harm in having some active, but you will notice an element of slow-down if you have too many running at the same time, so just be a little selective.

  1. Disable unnecessary animations and extras

Depending on the launcher you are using, you may find that there are various animations and special effects in place. These may look great, but they can also slow things down.

Check in your launcher’s settings to see if there is a way to disable any of these unnecessary extras, and you could earn yourself a speed boost.

  1. Close down apps and free up RAM

Multi-tasking several apps makes it easy to switch between different tools, but there can also be an impact on performance. You can quickly close down any apps you are no longer using by calling up the running apps list – press and hold the home key and then swipe away any apps you want to exit.

While you are at this screen, tap the pie chart button to the lower right of the screen and then move to the RAM section. Tap the Clear memory button and any background processes that are running unnecessarily will be closed down.

  1. Restart your device

A quick and simple fix for a slow device is to simply restart it. This can clear out the cache, stop unnecessary tasks from running, and get things running smoothly again.

Just hold down the power button, select the Restart option, and then tap OK to confirm.

  1. Dig deeper

You can also keep tabs on the apps that are using lots of battery by going to Settings > Battery. You can also monitor RAM usage in Settings > Apps (or App Manager, depending on your brand of phone) and there’s even more nerdy goodies in Process Stats in Developer Options – if you don’t have this setting enabled, go to Settings > About Phone and tap Build Number seven times until a notification pops up.

These 5 Things Are Killing Your Smartphone’s Battery Life

Battery life is an aspect of smartphones that hasn’t improved as much as other technology. If you’re a user that depends on your smartphone throughout your day, getting through a full day on a single charge can be a struggle. While there are battery packs and USB batteries that you can pick up, as well as phones specifically designed for their big batteries, sometimes that isn’t enough.

However, there are also things you can change about the way you use you your phone that can help save you some battery life. There are obvious battery-killers such as playing games or watching videos, but some factors are lesser known.

Here are five things that are killing your smartphone’s battery life that you may not have known about:

  1. Screen brightness

As smartphone displays get bigger, brighter and more resolution, the effect it has on battery life can be severe. While you can’t really do much with your phone without using your display, there are a number of things you can do to reduce the damage it’s having on your battery life.

On Android devices, the first thing you should do is turn on Adaptive Brightness so that your smartphone automatically adapts to the lowest amount of brightness that you really need. It’s much smarter than the “Auto-Brightness” feature of Android past. There are number of third-party Android apps that do this, but I’ve found the Adaptive Brightness feature to be fairly effective. If you want to save extra battery life, you can also toggle off the “Ambient display” setting, which will make sure your display isn’t activated every time you receive a notification. iOS has an Auto Brightness setting as well that you’ll want to toggle on.

But even with these features, it’s always important to keep the brightness of your display in mind when in use. The last thing you can do to help is change your Sleep settings so that your phone automatically turns off the display after a set amount of time. On iOS, you’ve got the Auto-Lock setting that performs the same function.

  1. Background App Refresh

The background app refresh feature in iOS can be a helpful way of letting your apps smartly update their save states while on WiFi or cell service. However, they can also suck the life out of your battery.

You can toggle it off completely to ensure that you’re always getting the most out of your battery. However, you can also go through your app list and toggle them on or off so that you can pick and choose the apps you want to be refreshing in the background. If you’re curious about which apps are using up your battery, head over to your Battery settings where you can easily see which apps are using the most juice.

On Android, you’ll find the option to restrict data usage on specific apps in Settings > Data usage > Data usage control. From there, you can choose which apps are allowed to use WiFi or Data or none at all. You also may want to disable auto-updating of apps, which happens in the background if it is toggled on.

  1. Streaming audio

If you’re someone who streams music or podcasts all day at work via services like Apple Music or Spotify, you may notice that your battery life isn’t lasting as long as it did with your collection of locally-stored music.

There’s not much you can do about this (other than just plug in your phone), but you can certainly try to download songs to your phone using Offline Mode on Spotify (and download podcasts ahead of time), which will sidestep having to stream all of this audio.

  1. Using Bluetooth

Speaking of streaming music, you may also have it connected to a Bluetooth speaker or pair of wireless headphones for extended amounts of time. Unfortunately, having your Bluetooth turned on all day is pulls extra juice out of your phone’s battery. In fact, it’s one of the worst things about not having a headphone jack anymore and switching over to wireless headphones.

There’s no way around this one, but it’s definitely something to be aware of as you are attempting to save juice for later in the day.

  1. GPS

Lastly, apps that use GPS or location services can be big battery-suckers. As you’ve got Google Maps or Apple Maps running, you’ll be putting a serious dent in your battery life. It’s not necessary to turn off Location Services altogether, but apps like Google Maps should be manually shut down when you arrive at your destination.

Manually closing down apps is easy in both iOS and Android. In iOS, just double-click the Home button and swipe away the app. In Android, hit the App Switcher button and swipe it away.

10 tips to better your smartphone battery life

Smartphones have come a long way over the last few years when it comes to design, camera, or even processing power. However, we have not seen much breakthroughs when it comes to battery technology –which is critical today given that handsets come packed with mammoth sized displays, multiple sensors, and faster processors that take a toll on battery life.

While a number of smartphone makers offer ‘Fast charging’ and ‘Power modes’ to deal with the situation, a concrete solution is still nowhere to be seen.

That said, here we have listed out some lesser known tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of your smartphone battery.

1/10 Turn off Vibration and Haptic feedback

We all like that mild vibrations while typing on the smartphone keyboard or while tapping the capacitive buttons, however they absorb a good amount of juice. Turning off the ‘Haptic feedback’ will help you save a good amount of battery because we spend a lot of time on typing throughout a day.

Besides, if you don’t really need to get notified by vibration, then turn it off as It actually takes more battery power to vibrate your phone than it does to ring it.

2/10 Turn off “Always on” Google Hotword detection

Turning off Google’s Hotword detection will also improve your Android smartphone’s battery life. This prevents your phone from always ready to listen to your command to perform a search function. Below are the steps to turn it off.

  • Go to Apps > Settings > Google Services > Search & Now > Voice.
  • Click on ‘OK Google detection’
  • Turn Off Always on

3/10 Reduce the screen brightness

If your smartphone boasts an AMOLED display, then applying Black coloured wallpapers will help you save battery life. This is because pixels that make the AMOLED displays only utlise battery power to illuminate light colours and don’t need any energy to show black colour. To simply put, the more dark or black pixels you have on your AMOLED display, the less power it consumes to illuminate them, thus saves the battery.

4/10 Customise which apps can use Location

Most of the apps that are installed on your smartphone (Android/iOS) constantly track your location. You might not want to turn it off while using Google Maps, Uber, sending location on WhatsApp, Tinder, etc. however keeping it on throughout the day while you don’t need location tracking will simply kill your smartphone battery. Turn it off while you are just using your handset for watching videos, sending e-mails, and apps where you don’t need location tracking.

5/10 Don’t miss on Android updates

Updating apps might seem to be a cumbersome task, but it actually helps in improving the overall smartphone performance and battery life. This is because developers keep updating apps to improve on battery and memory optimization. SO make sure your smartphone has the latest version of apps installed.

6/10 Turn on Airplane mode

This is not an everyday solution but can really help you cut battery usage. Turning on Airplane mode will cut you from the outside world but will allow your smartphone to last longer for multimedia apps such as videos, music player or games that don’t need any connectivity.

It can do wonders if you are travelling in a poor network zone where your smartphone antennas consume a lot of power to register on the available networks. Simply turn on the Airplane mode if you don’t want to receive any calls, messages or use internet.

7/10 Remove On-screen Widgets

Android operating system is all about widgets that offer tons of information on your smartphone displays. It is indeed a good thing to have everything on screen, however proves havoc for your smartphone battery. The battery has to supply continues power to make those widgets deliver latest updates from backend servers.

Delete the widgets that are placed to offer information not required throughout the day and still fetch data from internet such as weather apps, stock apps, scoreboards etc.

8/10Turn off Auto-sync

Apps such as Gmail, Twitter, calendar, etc. constantly refresh themselves to offer latest information. This is required if you just cannot afford to miss an important information but also takes a toll on battery life.

Go to Settings > Google account and turn off auto-sync for apps you don’t need constantly updated.

9/10 Doze mode (Android Marshmallow users)

Doze mode is the latest addition to Android OS and works on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow. You don’t need to do anything to use the new Doze feature and basically there are no switches or settings to activate or deactivate it. However you can edit the apps that utilise the battery optimization feature from Settings menu. Doze mode simply works in background on Marshmallow devices and puts your phone in hibernation mode whenever it lies unused for a longer duration.

10/10 Check on GPS, Bluetooth, NFC

Last but not the least; check on Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC and mobile data if you are not using them. Switch off the Wi-Fi if you are connected on Mobile data and vice versa. The NFC feature might get turn on if you restart your NFC enabled handset, s keep a check on it.

Besides, activate the low power mode on your smartphone if you are running low on battery.