Five tips to make your phone battery last longer

By Hannah Dooley Marketing Executive for Aspect IT

Aspect IT, based in Springhead, offers IT support, cloud services, website design, software development and more. Find out more online www.aspectit.co.uk or call 0161 241 9050.

THE longer you have and use a phone, the shorter the battery life seems to get, which can be very annoying when you’re out and about!

Especially because we rely on our phones for so much nowadays: paying for goods, transport, tickets for events, as well as calling and texting.

Here are some simple tips to help preserve your phone’s battery so you’re not scrambling for a plug socket.

1. Forget 0-100 per cent – Many people believe that to preserve your phone battery you need to wait until your phone is completely dead before you charge, and then it must be charged to 100 per cent.

However, this is a myth and can shorten your battery’s lifespan. Most modern phones use a lithium-ion battery and they are under the most stress when they’re fully charged or fully drained.
The best practices are to try to charge your battery to about 80 per cent and charge it again before it drops below 30 per cent. If you struggle with this, you could try charging to a maximum of 90 per cent and not letting the battery drop below 20 per cent.

2. Don’t charge overnight – This is another common mistake people make, leaving their phone charging all night. This shortens battery lifespan due to the increased voltage and heat that builds up over time.

If you are often exposing your smartphone to extreme temperatures, it’s one of the fastest ways to deplete your phone battery.

3. Lose location services – When your location services are turned on, your phone and applications are constantly refreshing and scanning your location through GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, all of which significantly drain phone battery. You can adjust these permissions in the settings of your phone, and we recommend only having them turned on when you’re using navigation apps for your privacy.

4. Turn off background refresh – A lot of apps update and refresh themselves outside of you using them, such as social media apps, eating away at your battery without you even knowing.

The good thing is that you can turn this off, for iPhone users, go to Settings >
General > Background app refresh to review which apps need to be refreshing themselves.

5. Don’t use your smartphone while it’s charging – I’m guilty of this one! I’m rarely patient enough to let my phone fully recharge without using it, but doing so not only uses your battery, but other internal components too, such as the screen display.

This causes your phone to work double-time and can result in excess heat being produced, further damaging the battery.

• Did we miss any tips? We’d love to hear yours! Let us know on social media – just search Aspect IT.