Your smartphone is always in your pocket or bag and must always be available. Unfortunately, your smartphone’s battery runs out during the day and you have to recharge it. How do you prevent your smartphone from being drained so quickly? We give you the 15 best tips and tricks.
01 Reduce brightness
The display of your smartphone uses by far the most energy and therefore it makes sense not to always have the brightness on maximum. In iOS, go to Settings / Display and clarity, in Android you can find this at Settings / Display. On both systems you can also swipe down and adjust the brightness of your screen with a slider. iOS has a dark mode to save your battery and in Android you will also find options at the settings to switch on the night lighting for example.
02 Know what power is consuming
Measuring is knowing and that’s why you go to Android Settings / Battery to see how your battery is doing. At the top you can see how much battery charge you have left and how long you can do with this if you don’t perform too heavy tasks. Handy is the option Battery saving. Tap it and put the slider behind Switch on battery saving On. Below you determine when your smartphone should do this. If battery saving is enabled, your smartphone changes the brightness of your screen, shows some apps with a black background, and temporarily disables some system functions.
In iOS, go to Settings / Battery to switch on the energy saving mode.
03 Switch on automatic lock
Make sure that the screen of your smartphone does not stay on unnecessarily long if you do not use it for a while. In iOS, navigate to Settings / Battery and tap Automatic lock. Here you choose after how many minutes the screen should turn off automatically. You will find a similar function at Android Settings / Display / Advanced / Sleep. Tap on it and choose a duration between 15 seconds and 30 minutes.
04 Leave your apps open
Contrary to what you may think, it is smarter to leave apps open in the background than to close them. Shutting down and restarting consumes more energy than leaving it on in the background. If an app is weird, then of course you have to stop it. In Android, tap an app icon for a second and choose App info. Tap on Stop now to stop an app immediately.
05 Disable notifications
Reports are useful and sometimes necessary, but if an app always checks in the background whether things are happening that you have to communicate, this naturally consumes energy. The solution: only retrieve messages and notifications as soon as you open an app. You do this in Android by going to Settings / Accounts to go and the bottom of the option Automatically synchronize data to turn off. Of course this is not always handy, but you can enable this option if you have very little battery left and you do not have the option to charge your smartphone quickly.
In iOS you can of course also do this, you will find this at Settings / Notification. Turn the slider off to stop seeing any notification or tap an app to turn it off for this app only.
06 Turn off location
One of the biggest culprits for draining your battery is the GPS function on your smartphone. If you want your battery to last longer, it’s best to turn the GPS off completely. Of course this is not useful if you use Google Maps often. In Android you go to Settings / Security and location / location and put the slider behind Use location from. Whether you decide per app whether you can use your location. You do this by clicking on Permissions at app level to tap. On iOS, go to Settings / Privacy / Location Services.
07 Bluetooth, NFC and WiFi
Wireless protocols such as WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC use a lot of energy, which is why it is smart to switch it off when your battery is low. Swipe down in Android or iOS and tap the relevant icon to, for example, temporarily disable WiFi. There are also apps that allow you to automatically disable this type of thing, for example a good app for Android is WiFi Automatic, this app automatically disables Wi-Fi when it no longer detects Wi-Fi connections.
08 Turn off pixels
Did you know that on some Android smartphones you can reduce your screen resolution? On a Samsung Galaxy you will find this option in the settings. A handy app for all other Android smartphones is Pixoff: Battery Saver. With this you can switch off certain pixels in your screen. The principle is that one of every two pixels is turned off. You can still read everything, but your screen becomes a bit grainy. In the app you can test different patterns before going on Enable Filter ticks. Extremely handy if you are really in battery trouble.
It is not possible to turn off specific pixels on your iPhone.
