Prolonging Your Cellphone Battery- What you may be doing wrong!

Hello, thanks for being here!

I had one of those moments today where I reached for my cellphone and thought back to the days before these amazing devices graced our world . . . the pre-cellphone era where payphones were the only way to communicate with someone once you’d left the house and where  a map was the only way to deal with any kind of navigational challenge.

For many,  life without a cellphone won’t even be possible to comprehend but for those of us who grew up with the Ed Sullivan show and I Love Lucy (boy there’s nothing like dating yourself!) the benefits of cellphone technology don’t often escape us.

I feel completely lost without my cellphone on the days where, god forbid . . .  I’ve gone and forgotten it at home.  Those moments never fail to make me stop and ponder how it was that I ever managed to navigate life without one.

We’ve all been there and more than  a time or two I’m sure, that moment when you reach for your cellphone only to find out your battery’s dead and you realize . . .  your hooped!

We’ve come to rely heavily on our cellphones to communicate, navigate and capture those special moments in life and nothing’s more frustrating than finding out that our ability to do just that has come to a grinding halt due to a dead battery.

But here’s the thing . . . what was once believed to help extend the battery life in our devices might actually be consuming more of it! How many of us subscribed to the old theory that it was critical to close our app’s after each use in order to prolong our cellphone’s battery life?

Did you know that both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS software leave apps in a paused state in a devices memory?  The reason for this is so that the next time you go to open the app, it can open up quickly.  By closing an app after use you end up removing it from your device’s memory and depending on the app, you could be effectively forcing the app to reload from scratch each time when you go to open it, actually  consuming more of your battery’s life!

So where does this leave the age old dilemma of what to do when trying to conserve our cellphone batteries?

There’s two ways that are thought to be more beneficial in accomplishing this according to the tech guru’s and one is by reducing or disabling some or all of an apps notifications.  If you happen to be an app junkie like me, you probably have dozens of apps running on your cellphone. By going into your phones “Settings > Notifications” and disabling or limiting each apps notifications you can help reduce the drain on your devices battery.

The other way in which you can help conserve your battery’s life is to  restrict your cellphones data usage.

If you’re an Android user, you can find the offending app that’s putting the greatest demands on your battery by going to your Settings>Data usage.  The data hog will be visible and you can then remove the app’s access to use background data.  You can repeat this process with any other apps that are big data using offenders.

If your an iOS user, you’ll find the information under Settings>General>Background app refresh. Once again go through each of your apps and turn this feature off for as many apps as you want.

I use an iPhone 6S and can readily find the greatest energy offenders under Settings>Battery.  Here I can readily see what percentage each app has been using during the last 24 hours and or 7 days and I can even find out how much usage I’ve had since my last full charge. Pretty cool right!

So there it is, the latest thinking on how to conserve your cellphone’s battery.

 

With Gratitude,

Bev