Nowadays, a lot of people have become more connected than ever. Smartphones indeed come in very handy in keeping us updated and connected with the rest of the world. However, a phone’s battery life is just as important as the phone itself. Regardless of your phone’s capabilities, it’ll all be rendered inefficient unless your phone battery can keep up with you throughout the day. Notably, while most smartphone users invest more in reliable covers or casing, they often neglect to protect their phone’s battery.
If you’re thinking of preserving and prolonging your phone’s battery life, there are many relevant things you must know. That said, we highlight all of the vital information to help extend your phone’s battery life.
Understanding The Component Of A Phone Battery
The most common battery found in smartphones is ‘lithium-ion batteries’. To provide you with a better understanding of a phone’s battery components, let’s first discuss how batteries work. Three elements are required for electricity to flow within batteries, keeping you charged for the day.
The first element is the anode or the negative component of the battery. It’s labeled as the negative (-) sign in a battery. A chemical reaction from this component will build up positive ions and electrons.
The next element is the cathode that doesn’t accumulate any elective or positive ions. It’s symbolized as the positive (+) sign on a battery. The negative charge will equalize the difference by passing through the cathode.
The last element we’ll discuss is the electrolyte. Basically, an electrolyte is an insulator that blocks negative charges while moving through it. It is placed between the anode and the cathode, blocking them from one another. As a result, electrons can’t pass through directly from the cathode to the anode.
If a conductor links between the anode and the cathode outside the battery, the negative charges will now have the alternative method to pass through from the cathode to the anode. As the negative charge passes through the conductor, the positive ions traverse through the other direction into the electrolyte and towards the cathode. The process in which electrons move through the conductor will generate electrical power, hence powering up any electrical device connected to the conductor.
Lithium-ion batteries are considered one of the lightest metal components that have excellent electrochemical capacity. Despite its weight, it contains the largest energy capacity. In terms of sustainability, lithium-ion batteries are more stable and safer compared to traditional batteries. They also have fewer impacts on the environment when disposed of.
What Is The Average Lifespan Of A Phone Battery?
The amount of lithium ions in the phone battery’s anode and cathode is reduced for every charge and discharge over a period of time. Hence, phone battery life eventually deteriorates once it has reached a specific number of charge and discharge cycle. In a nutshell, a phone’s battery lifespan is the number of charges and discharges a battery can handle before it loses its ultimate performance.
On the contrary, a phone’s battery life only measures the duration for a singular discharge. With Apple smartphones, the battery lifespan ranges between 300 to 500 charge cycles, approximating 1.5 to 2 years of normal performance. As a result, Apple devices’ battery life will begin deteriorating notably to approximately 80% levels with full charge capacity after 500 charges. It will also continue to decline to zero once more charges are depleted on the phone battery.
What Is The Price Of A Phone Battery Replacement?
Before anything else, check if your smartphone is still under warranty. If you have an insurance policy, verify with the company if a phone battery replacement is available. The majority of smartphone manufacturers have standard one-year warranties for defective smartphone batteries. Mobile service providers such as AT&T and Verizon have insurance plans that won’t charge any amount for faulty smartphone batteries. AppleCare warranty also offers battery replacement for free.
If you’re already out of warranty or your insurance policy won’t cover battery replacement costs, phone battery replacement will cost between $10 to $100. Some battery replacements can go as high as $299, depending on your smartphone’s brand and model. The process takes approximately five to seven days from the date you surrendered your device for repair services.
Given the cost of a phone battery replacement, you should evaluate whether it’s worth the price or not. In most cases, new smartphones are already introduced in the market after two years. That said, instead of opting for a battery replacement, it’s much ideal to invest in a new device and sell your older smartphone for cash. However, if you indeed want to retain your smartphone’s previous performance, you must be prepared to cover the costs.
How To Preserve Your Phone Batteries?
1. Avoid Extreme Temperatures
Specifically, cold temperatures don’t come on good terms with phone batteries. If you’re residing or have visited cold countries with freezing temperatures, you may have observed that your phone battery life isn’t durable enough. Due to a smartphone’s lithium-ion content, extreme temperatures usually compromises the phone battery’s performance. That said, extreme cold weather accelerates the battery’s resistance, resulting in a decrease in positive ions and electrons.
In addition, the chemical reactions are blocked or slowed down by freezing temperatures, thus resulting in poor battery output. According to Live Science, chemists don’t exactly know the reason why. Therefore, smartphone manufacturers can’t identify why the battery indicator isn’t accurate enough when subjected to extremely cold temperatures.
2. Conserve Battery Power
Both Android and iOS smartphones are integrated with power-saving features that automatically adjusts your configurations. Activate this feature to utilize a reduced amount of battery charge necessary to keep your smartphone working normally. With ‘Low Power Mode’, all non-essential tasks with your smartphone will automatically turn off.
If you’re an Apple user, you can enable/disable this feature through ‘Settings > Battery > Lower Power Mode’. For Android devices, you can activate the power-saving feature through the ‘Settings’ app. You can go to ‘Device Care > Battery > Power Mode’. Once accessed, you can tap ‘High Performance, Optimized, Medium Power Savings, or Maximum Power Saving’. While this is one of the crucial battery care practices, it significantly optimizes your phone battery life to an extent.
3. Avoid Depleting Your Phone Battery To Zero
You’ve probably heard that the most efficient way to preserve a phone battery life is to charge it fully and deplete it completely, draining it to zero. With older types of battery, it’s a suggested holdover. However, newer lithium-ion batteries, such as smartphone batteries, won’t work with this method. It doesn’t recommend any battery capacity for proper calibration.
As a result, you’re only stressing your smartphone’s battery to its maximum capacity. Lithium-ion batteries become more stressed if you either fully charge or drain it. Ideally, you must charge it up to approximately 80% and avoid discharging it lower than 30%. If it’s not possible, aim for 90% for a full charge cycle and start recharging your smartphone before reaching 20% battery capacity.
4. Enable Dark Mode/Lower The Screen Brightness
The newer flagship smartphones from Apple and Samsung allows you to activate ‘Dark Mode’. Thanks to this new feature, you can now preserve your phone battery life significantly. With Dark Mode, Google reported approximately 63% battery savings when this setting is activated. For iOS devices, AppleInsider reports nearly 60% in phone battery savings when the Dark Mode feature is enabled.
With LED and AMOLED screens, it doesn’t only deplete your phone battery life but also damages your healthy eye vision. For prolonging your phone battery life, you can adjust its screen to the darkest yet comfortable level. Both Android and iOS smartphones come with an Auto-Brightness feature.
For Android, you can go to ‘Settings > Display > Brightness’. On the other hand, the Auto-Brightness feature on iOS devices can be accessed through ‘Settings > Display & Brightness’.
5. Disable Haptic, Vibrate, and Background App Refresh Configurations
Did you know that force-closing apps on your smartphone can only make things worse? As a result, smartphone manufacturers developed the ‘Background App Refresh’ feature for automatically configuring mobile apps. Through this feature, it provides a remedy for smartphone users who are fond of force-closing mobile apps in the hopes of improving their phone battery life.
Instead of force-closing, you should evaluate which of the mobile apps are running actively in the background. As an alternative, you can activate the Background App Refresh feature on iOS through ‘Settings > General > Background App Refresh’.
For Android mobile devices, you can navigate to ‘Settings > Apps & Notifications’. Once you’re in the app section, tap ‘Advanced > Battery > Background Restriction’.
6. Invest In Battery-Saving Apps
Like other integrations within your smartphone, numerous developers create mobile apps to preserve the phone battery life. Despite several settings and usage that influence battery lifespan, investing in battery-saving apps work wonders. They evaluate which apps significantly use your battery and provides comprehensive information regarding the related apps.
With battery-saving apps, you can conveniently prolong your phone battery life without manually tweaking or adjusting numerous custom settings or configurations. These apps also provide suggestions regarding phone battery replacement. It’s either you opt for a new battery or purchase a new device.
7. Deactivate Location Services
Unless you’re currently traveling or geotagging your captured memories, you don’t necessarily need your smartphones to always track your exact location. Enabling location services isn’t only compromising your privacy but also significantly affects your phone battery life. In most cases, you don’t need to authorize your mobile apps to track your location all at once. That said, you can customize which of these apps can enable location services.
For Apple devices, you can adjust the location services feature through ‘Settings > Privacy > Location Services’. From there, you can choose whether the app will track your location in three variations, namely: Never, Ask Next Time, or While Using The App.
For Android mobile devices, navigate to ‘Settings > Apps & Notifications > Advanced > App Permissions’. Once you’re in the list of apps, you can enable or disable specific apps’ location services to help save your phone battery life.
8. Turn Off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Services If Applicable
One of the most common wrong practices of using your smartphone is leaving the Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi services enable even though you’re not using it. Little did you know that these services deplete your phone battery since your smartphone continuously searches for available networks to connect.
Hence, these services are running continuously in the background even though you don’t intend to utilize them. If you’re going out, it’s best to turn off your Wi-Fi services. By doing so, your mobile device won’t have to work in the background just to search for an available hotspot that you don’t intend to access.
9. Don’t Overcharge Your Phone Battery
While it’s common to charge your smartphone overnight, it compromises the phone battery life. When your phone reaches 100%, it doesn’t only experience high stress but also accumulates extreme heat over time. While smartphones generally won’t overheat, experiencing scorching temperature is one of the fastest ways to decrease your phone battery life. If overnight charging is inevitable, place your smartphone in a well-ventilated area. For example, putting your smartphone under your pillows or blankets is extremely dangerous.
10. Keep Your Apps Up-To-Date
Once an available update is downloadable, update your mobile apps with the latest version or release. Developers are continuously updating their mobile apps to enhance features, fixes, and also improve battery performance.
As a best practice, you must remove unnecessary apps on your smartphone. That said, perform a clean-up on your mobile apps that you no longer need. In terms of updating mobile apps, you can configure your apps to update automatically or manually. For optimum phone battery life, manual updates are better than automatic updates.
What Can Ruin Your Phone Battery?
Overcharging Your Smartphone
You’ve probably read numerous times that overcharging isn’t the best option for preserving phone battery life. If you’re used to plugging in your smartphones for extended periods, note that it’s not healthy for your phone battery life. Instead, it keeps the internal battery temperature high, resulting in stress that significantly impacts your smartphone’s durability.
Draining Your Phone Battery Regularly
Another bad practice that eventually depletes your phone battery life is draining your phone battery to zero before recharging it. According to numerous studies, completely draining your phone battery life will shorten its lifespan. You should maintain your phone’s battery charge between 30% to 80% for an optimized battery lifespan. As mentioned, a fully depleted and overcharged smartphone results in high stress on the battery — the perfect recipe for a shortened phone battery life.
Using Your Smartphone While Recharging It
When you’re using your smartphone while it’s still recharging, you’re not only using the battery but other internal components as well, such as the screen display. It will eventually lead to overheating. Incessant usage while charging will cause your phone to work double-time to accommodate both functions. As a result, it causes your battery to overheat and eventually deplete your phone’s battery life in the long run.
Conclusion
There you go! We highlighted everything you need to know regarding phone battery care and the corresponding best practices. Undoubtedly, smartphones are a necessity in our daily lives. However, its effectiveness is directly proportional to how you can prolong the phone battery life. Given that you already know how a smartphone battery works and how you can preserve the battery lifespan, you can save a hefty amount of money in the long run by not investing in unexpected battery replacements.
Do you have any tips and recommendations related to extending your phone battery life? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comment section below!
