Better Battery

Let's discuss your devices battery life and ways you can make it better.

 This episode is covering your battery and things you can do to help maintain capacity and lifespan.  Now this does involve a few different aspects including your display, your device toggle switches like bluetooth/wifi, background apps and some other stuff too.  These topics cover both Android and iOS devices.

 This 2010 article by Techrepublic is referenced to see if the five tips that were mentioned are still viable today:

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-tips-for-extending-lithium-ion-battery-life/ 

Keep your batteries at room temperature Utilize a high capacity battery instead of spare Perform partial discharges while avoiding full ones Avoid completely draining the lithium ion batteries Have a forty percent charge when storing for long periods of time

 

The two articles below are summaries of studies from 2002/2003 that relate to the 20/80 rule (recharge your device at 20% battery life, up to 80%, then unplug from charging. 

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775303002088

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775302003051

 You can use Apple's battery stats in the settings for information on the battery health in iOS. 

 For Android, you can use an app like Accubattery

 On the software side, be careful of apps that want to manage wifi/bluetooth/GPS <--- especially GPS as once its on, apps that utilize your location can connect in the background or behind the scenes, and will contribute to draining your battery quickly.  Sometimes the apps that utilize these features and enable them do not disable them once they are closed.  Thus, these switches are on without your knowledge and contribute to battery drain.  I recommend periodically checking these switches to ensure the ones that you are utilizing are on as needed.  You can also monitor apps' usage of data from within Android and iOS settings to reduce the background network usage that occurs when you're not using those apps.

 Screen brightness and screen on time are other major factors that contribute to faster discharging.  Using a dark color background for your homescreen and manually adjusting screen brightness for a level that's bright enough for you to see and isn't overly bright, will help extend your battery life.  This, along with screen on time that's adjusted for 10-15 seconds unless you manually turn off the screen, will also help extend your battery life.

 Do you have power struggles with your batteries?  What are some of the things you've tried to get more life out of your devices?  I'd love to know!  Leave a comment on the site (beforeyouinstall.com)  or tweet to me @thebuddygregory.