3 Tips to Save your Power

If you’re anything like me, you tend to live off your phone. I have an iPhone, and so I use it near regularly throughout my day. This means that when I workout I have it tracking, I listen to my music on it, heck, I even buy my coffee in the morning with it.

Naturally, I’m concerned with how much power my phone has. The last thing that I would ever want is to be stuck somewhere without having my phone have some charge on it. Not only do I use it as I’ve stated above, but also I text my wife a lot on it. I try to maintain my power levels as best as I can.

I read an article recently which claimed to have insights on “how to save power on your phone” but, much to my disappointment, the only piece of advice it gave was to replace the phone after a while. While buying a new phone will give you better battery life there are a few simple tricks to extend your battery life. Newer phones have better technology, and batteries do wear down over time, so it’s important to maintain your battery life. Please be aware that this is for Apple Products; I don’t have a lot of experience with Android although I would imagine that there are some similar tricks for those devices as well.

1) Limited Background App Refresh – This is a feature that allows you to go from app to app without losing your place. Say, as an example, you are in the middle of a book and then switch apps to go over to your e-mail, and then switch apps to play a game for a few minutes. The app refresh allows you to save your place, so when you go back to the book app, you won’t have to start from the beginning by opening the book and flipping to whatever page you were on. Unfortunately what it also does is search (using the internet) for updates, which takes more power. I typically turn off my Background App refresh for 90% of my apps, unless I want them to be searching for updates. The update search only happens with enough battery life, so if you are below a certain percentage, your phone won’t do it.

2) Low Battery Mode – iPhone (and frankly most portable Apple products) have a “Low Battery Mode” which makes it so that any apps that use extra battery power (like when you e-mail searches for new e-mails to download) are prevented from using the extra juice to do so. Once your phone reaches 10% power, you are prompted to turn on your low power mode. However, if you think you’re going to be in a situation where you will need to extend your battery life, you can turn on the low power mode in your settings

3) Notifications – Every time anything happens on your phone with one of the apps, you can be notified. Get an e-mail? Notification! Your lives in Candy Crush have refilled? Notification! Did someone like your post on Facebook? Notification! It’s important to realize that all of these notifications take power away from your battery life. On my phone, I have a few dozen apps, but I only have 5 or 6 which have their notifications turned on. Limiting the number of notifications that you get from your phone will extend your battery life lots.

BONUS TIP – Close your apps – Whenever you press the home button and get out of an app, you should be aware that the app is still technically “turned on”. the more apps that are turned on, the more battery power that your phone will need to keep them open. I’m guilty of this one, so what I tend to do is once a week, I’ll double-click my home button (which is what allows you to see all the apps that are open) and close them all by swiping up. This may be a small measure to save battery power, but by closing your apps on a regular basis, it will help you save your battery life.

In today’s world phones have become so much more than just devices to talk to each other. They keep our calendars; they’re our address books, they sort our mail, and keep us entertained through music and video. There also an unbelievable number of social media channels that we can get on our phones, to say nothing of the traditional news. All of this takes battery power, and if you don’t happen to be near a charger for an extended period, your battery can run out rather fast. Short of being not more than 20 feet from a charger for an extended period, you need to be able to extend your battery life for as long as possible. Hopefully, some or all of the ideas I have here will help you maintain control over your Digital Life.

Do you find your Battery Runs down fast? 

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