I remember someday last week I was chatting with my friend and I randomly asked her why she was charging her devices(both PC and Phone) yet she was leaving for home. She sarcastically asked me if I still believe in power distribution company UMEME with all the load shedding and unreliability of power across the country. Her statements made sense when I came back to my place last evening with phone battery power below 50% and I had to nurse my insomnia in darkness. I guess the only solution is to keep your phones fully charged before leaving your respective workplaces or school.
However if you get caught up and didn’t have time to do so fortunately, there are creative ways to extend battery life and earn you some few extra hours or minutes to enjoy your online addiction. Here are some few strategies you can use.
Lower the brightness on your phone
Auto-brightness is one of the useful features in smartphones that make it easy for you to look at your phone screen regardless of the level of darkness without straining your eyes. Despite its usefulness, this is among the features that drain battery power a lot and so when your mission is to save power, turning it off or lowering the brightness of your phone should be one of the first steps you do to borrow some time.
On Android, this feature is most accessible when swiping down from the top of the screen for the quick settings. On iOS, however, you get it from swiping the bottom of the screen and reducing the brightness from the control setting.
Close apps that are sucking your phone’s battery
Apps running in the backgrounds are often more burdensome on your phone performance and end up draining your phone battery more, closing such apps can be really helpful. Nowadays, recent iOS and Android versions are endowed with features that allow identifying Apps that are consuming more energy so that you can extend the duration of your mobile phone battery just by closing down the most wasteful ones.
Lower the screen timeout on your phone
Screen timeout is the time you wait for your phone’s display to switch off automatically when not using it. The longer your phone’s screen is actually turned on, the more power drained from your phone. You can cut down on this by making sure your phone’s screen shuts off quickly when it’s not in use. Most people set the screen timeout to a practical time for them but if you really want to save battery life, you might want to choose the 30-second option or below.
Conduct One Task at a Time
You might have read somewhere that multitasking is a myth and trying to do so seldom work. When using our smartphones we have developed habits of opening apps and leaving them running on the background without realizing how much it consumes up our batteries. The best way to save battery strength is to conduct one task at a time. Open one app when using it and close immediately before opening others.
Turn Off Vibrations
Vibration is a very useful mode if you are in a meeting or in a place where absolute silence is required, but not many people know that vibrations require more power than ringtones. So it’s better to use this mode only when needed.
Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you’re not using them
Even though they consume very little power, only turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as long as you need them, and there’s no need to have both Wi-Fi and mobile data turned on at all times, especially if you know exactly when you’ll need one or the other. Sometimes leaving certain features turned on when not in use can impact your smartphone’s battery life negatively.
Disable push notifications
Push notifications prompt alerts to appear on your phone’s lock screen as soon as they come in. It’s useful for seeing important information right away but it can consume battery life since it pushes your phone’s display to be on frequently.
Explore the battery saving features on your phone
Both Android phones and iOS devices have a battery saving feature. On Android OS, when turned on you might not be able use other apps apart from the primary phones services but it’s a useful option when all you are waiting for is a phone call and your battery is about to drain. On iPhones the battery saving feature can buy you time and you can make sure it’s automatically switched on when battery power is at a certain percentage.
