How Do I Keep My Laptop’s Battery In Good Health?
You’ve probably heard some people say you should drain your battery completely
before charging it, or that you should keep it between 40% and 80% all the time
to make it last longer. A lot of this is confusion over how batteries used to work,
not how they work today. Luckily, most or all of your gadgets these days run on
Lithium Ion batteries, which are easy to take care of. We recommend reading our
full guide on how they work, but the gist is: they last longer when you perform
shallow discharges, keep them cool, and don’t leave them plugged in while
they’re running at 100% battery. Honestly, though, batteries have a finite life no
matter what, and your efforts will only go so far—so don’t stress about it. Focus
your efforts on getting better battery life out of your iPhone, Android phone, or
laptop on a given charge instead.
How to Improve Your iPhone’s Battery Life
Start with the Simple Stuff
There are a few things everyone ought to do if they’re looking to get a little more power from
their iPhone, and for the most part it just involves understanding which features have a
noticeable impact on the battery. Some are obvious and some are not, but if you turn them off or
manage them better your device will stay on for a little longer each day.
Disabling Push Email will let your device idle rather than constantly waiting around for a new
message. Sure, you might not get an email seconds after it was sent, but if immediate delivery
isn’t critical you should just set your phone to poll your mail servers less often.
Turning off Location Services is another helpful battery saver. Your GPS loves sipping power,
so if you keep your apps from constantly tracking your location your iPhone will last a bit longer.
Download over Wi-Fi instead of 3G. If you have any larger downloads, such as a software
update, a podcast, music, video, or whatever, you’ll be better off letting Wi-Fi handle the
download. First of all, it’ll generally download faster over a Wi-Fi connection so your phone
won’t be actively downloading for quite as long. Second, your phone’s 3G radio tends to be a
little more battery-hungry so it’ll cause more of a drain regardless.
Disable unnecessary notifications. Every time you receive a notification, your device’s screen
lights up to tell you. This takes a little power and you probably don’t need to be notified of every
little thing that every app wants to tell you. Go into your iPhone’s notification settings (in the
Settings app) and turn off notifications for any app you don’t really care about.
Extend Your iPhone’s Battery Life by Quitting Apps in the
Multitasking Queue
The apps you have “running” on your iDevice may actually be eating up a little battery life after
all. While Apple claims that their solution to multitasking—which is suspending apps rather than
having them truly run in the background—is better for battery life. While that may be the case, it
seems that having a bunch of apps in the multitasking queue may actually hurt your battery life a
little bit after all.
According to David Pogue, in his column for the New York Times, keeping a bunch of apps
suspended in your multitasking queue is actually sucking up you device’s battery life: P
Background apps. Nicole the Genius discovered that my friend had a huge number of apps
open – maybe 40 of them. She maintained that they were using battery power, too, in the
background … But I’d been led to believe that background apps are generally frozen into
suspended animation precisely so that they don’t use battery power … Even so, Nicole quit all
40 of the apps that were still open … The next day, my friend’s battery, by the same time of day
(5 p.m.), was still at 80 percent!
This does make sense, as suspending many apps likely does take minimal system resources
which add up once you have a bunch of apps in your queue, but it’s hard to say exactly what
about multitasking is draining the battery. Nonetheless, it’s easy to clear out your multitasking
queue by double-tapping the home button, pressing and holding an app in the queue, and then
tapping the “-” in the app’s corner. Of course, you’ll have to do this for a lot of apps if you
haven’t been quitting anything with regularity. Nonetheless, it’s better than nothing.
Clear the multitasking queue so you don’t have an endless trail of open apps. Even though
Apple designed multitasking to be battery-friendly, suspending a ton of apps still takes its toll. It
can be frustrating to manually close a bunch of apps in the multitasking queue, but doing this on
a weekly basis can help reduce unwanted battery drain.
Solutions for Demanding Users
Disabling a few features here and there will provide you with a little extra life, but the difference
won’t move mountains. Additionally, you may want a lot of these features on because you need
to use them. If you can’t make many (or any) of the sacrifices described above, you still have a
few more options.
Buy an external battery, like the Mophie Juice Pack. You should probably have a case on your
iPhone anyway, and Mophie’s cases have batteries built-in. They do add some bulk, as the
battery has to go somewhere, but it’s not much and a small sacrifice for nearly doubling your
iPhone’s run time. Mophie and others also offer several external battery options that you can just
plug in and use to receive a boost when needed. You have to charge these devices separately,
but it’ll be worth the trouble when you need your phone and its battery is running low.
Buy plenty of extra chargers so you can power your phone wherever you are. This doesn’t
necessarily improve your battery life but it improves the likelihood that your iPhone will last as
long as you need it. Put a charger in your car, at your desk, by your bed, and anywhere else you
frequently find yourself so you never have to go through any trouble to plug it in. You may even
want to pick up a solar charger for those times when you’re not near an outlet. Hopefully you
won’t find yourself in a situation where you’re that desperate for iPhone power, but if you are
then many charging options should have you covered.