Beat load shedding by saving your phone battery

By Staff reporter | 15 May 2019 at 09:27hrs
Battery
We all know our cell phones are so much more than just a way to keep in touch. Many of us use our phones to play games, watch videos, browse social media, chat with friends, pick up emails, manage appointments, navigate to destinations and so much more.

These days, cell phones are also considered an important means of letting others know of our whereabouts. Having a fully charged phone is a responsible measure of being prepared for unforeseen events, therefore it is important to keep your smartphone charged up especially with the current random power cuts.

So beat load shedding by saving up the power in your phone battery, and here are some the tips to extend smartphone battery life, without making your phone unusable:

1. Turn on Adaptive Battery

Open your Settings > Battery > Adaptive Battery and slide the toggle to enable Adaptive Battery. This Android Pie-introduced feature prevents any apps that you do not frequently use from draining an excessive amount of power in the background.

Immediately below this option is a Restricted App list, which will be empty by default. You can't just put any app you choose in this list; rather, Adaptive Battery monitors apps running in the background and if any are using an excessive amount of energy you will see a notification warning you of their behaviour and offering to add the app to this list.

2. Stop apps running in the background

Even if you're not running Android Pie and don't have access to Adaptive Battery, you can keep a check on what apps are running in the background and kill off any that don't need to be in the multitasking menu. In Android Pie just swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access this; in older versions of Android you should see a dedicated button to one side of the home button.

Do note that force-closing an app is only actually helpful if you're not going to relaunch it moments later, since it uses more power to re-open that app than it saves by killing its background processes.

3. Reduce the screen brightness and turn off Adaptive Brightness

You can reduce the screen brightness in Settings > Display > Brightness level, then moving down the slider to a more comfortable level. You'll often also find a brightness slider in a phone's pull-down notification bar.

While you're in this menu, also disable Adaptive brightness. You might think this feature will help battery life by raising the screen brightness only when required, but it's easily fooled by indoor lighting and, moreover, takes all control out of your hands.

4. Reduce the Sleep timeout

Every time you wake the screen it remains active for a predetermined period even after you have finished whatever it was you wanted to do. You can adjust this length of time, and the shorter you make the screen timeout the less battery power will be wasted.

Find this option in Settings > Display > Advanced > Sleep. The shortest you can set is 15 seconds.

5. Reduce the volume/ Turn off vibration

The louder your phone rings or plays audio, the faster its battery is going to run down. Sure haptic feedback is great for alerting you to incoming notifications and calls It takes power to shake your phone, so reduce that power usage by switching it off when not required.

So adopt some of these tips to ensure that your power stays longer on your phone, because the amount of battery life of our mobile phones depends on how and what we use it on.

(additional infor:techadvisor)

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