Power Guzzlers: Avoid These Mistakes to Save Your Smartphone Battery

There are some mistakes that drain the smartphone battery quickly and cause the device to break down faster. We show you which simple tricks you can use to save battery power.

Saving electricity in everyday life is good for the environment and your wallet. You can also reduce the power consumption of your smartphone battery and thus avoid unnecessary energy waste. But this has another effect: The less often you have to charge the battery, the longer you’ll get something out of your phone. This is because the number of possible charging cycles of the cell phone battery is limited.

Note: If your battery is completely empty so that the phone simply switches itself off, you should let it charge briefly before switching it on again. Your phone has a mechanism that switches itself off when the battery is low, to protect its hardware from a short circuit, for example.

5 MISTAKES TO AVOID

Basically, the less you use your smartphone, the less battery it consumes. But even when you’re not holding your phone, it needs power. In the background, it checks emails, downloads updates (depending on the settings) or waits for possible calls and messages. When you’re not using your smartphone, you should therefore deactivate as many connections and services as possible to save battery power. Avoid the following mistakes:

Keep unused functions active: In the settings of your smartphone, you should switch off WLAN, Bluetooth, mobile data, and the location function if you do not need them at the moment.
Do not use flight mode: Alternatively, you can also switch to flight mode. The only difference is that you won’t be able to receive calls and text messages.
Leave apps running: You should also close all running apps when you are not using them. Otherwise, the apps will continue to run in the background and consume unnecessary power. You can usually find active apps in the settings under “Running apps” – you can also end them there.
Allow background updates: Deactivate the “background update” in the settings, otherwise Messenger, for example, will search for new messages all the time – which consumes a lot of power.
Ignore low-power mode: Many smartphones also have an energy-saving mode or low-power mode. Here, not only the listed functions are disabled, but also some background services. Get into the habit of using this mode for your phone.
The function “Hey Siri” (iPhone and iPad) or “Okay Google” (Android smartphones) is somewhat hidden. This activates the smartphone’s voice assistant, so the phone is on hold the whole time. Deactivating the function in the settings saves additional battery. You can activate Hey Siri via the general settings.

The biggest battery sucker in smartphones: The display.

If you conserve the smartphone battery, you also have to charge it less often.

By far the biggest part of the battery consumption is due to the display: The brighter the display is, the more energy it needs. However, a bright display is often not necessary – especially in the evening, when little light is enough.

You can reduce the display brightness via a slider in the settings. You can also find these settings by swiping up from the edge of the display (iPhone) or swiping down from the edge of the display on Android smartphones.

CONSUME LESS BATTERY

Do without games: Games consume more energy than probably any other app.

You should also only use the camera sparingly and without a flash – it eats up a lot of battery.

You can find the biggest power guzzlers under “Battery” in the settings. Then you can consider whether you can do without one or the other app.

Avoid extreme temperatures: In extreme cold or heat, the battery can discharge quickly – avoid such situations. Check out our 6 tips against heat buildup on your phone.

For all smartphones, there are power-saving apps that perform most of the settings listed here for you at the touch of a button. One of them is AccuBattery (Android – free).

The general rule is: To ensure that the battery lasts as long as possible, the battery level should always be between 20 and 80 percent. Then, especially many charging cycles are possible.