3 More Battery-Saving Tips for Your Smartphone

Earlier in March, I wrote about three tricks to extend battery life on any smartphone, like turning off WiFi when you’re not using it, shortening your screen lock time and minimizing the activity of apps you don’t use. Unfortunately, there have not been great advances in battery technology since my previous post, so I’m back with three more tips to save battery life:

1. Turn down screen brightness.
This is a tried-and-true battery tip: if you cut down the amount of light you ask your smartphone to put out every time you check email, send a text, etc., you’ll save battery juice. Most smartphones make it easy to adjust brightness with shortcuts to your brightness setting. On many devices, you can do it by simply sliding your finger up or down on your homescreen. Sidenote: turning down brightness may also help you sleep better. It turns out that using a bright phone before bedtime can interfere with your body’s natural sleep hormones.

2. Turn off GPS when you don’t need it.
Many apps (like maps or weather apps) only work if they know where in the world you are and to do it they use GPS. GPS works by pinging 3 or 4 different satellites, then deducing your location, which is really pretty impressive! But as a Google engineer explains, this is a relatively slow process and the time it takes eats up your phone’s battery. To extend battery life, you can go to your settings and switch GPS off. Many apps make it easy for you to turn it back on when needed by allowing you to turn on GPS from within the app itself.

3. Use the built-in battery-saving mode on your phone.
Nearly all smartphones now come with a handy, built-in power-saving mode. The engineers who know your smartphone inside and out build these power-saving modes, so they work very well. All you need to do is switch power-saving mode on from within your settings and let your phone work its power-saving magic from there.

It could be a long time before we see significant improvements in battery technology. In the meantime, take advantage of battery-saving tips like these to keep your smartphone as powered-up as possible.