Increase Your Time In Between Charges

Does it often seem like every time you turn around, you’re having to charge your cell phone? Have you ever wondered if it’s something you are doing, or if cell phone batteries are just designed to fail quickly? By following the steps below, you may just find that you have much more life in your battery between charges.

•   Turn your phone off. This is probably the most effective and simple way of conserving your battery’s power. It will help conserve energy and will also charge your phone. If you don’t plan on answering the phone while sleeping or after business hours, just turn it off. Do the same whenever you have your phone in an area with no reception, as searching for service depletes the battery fairly quickly. If you don’t need to receive or make calls but are using a smartphone as a PDA, disable the phone functionality (flight mode).

•   Stop searching for a signal. The best way to ensure longer battery life is to make sure you have a great signal where you use your phone. If you don’t have a perfect signal, get a cell phone repeater, which will amplify the signal to provide near perfect reception anywhere.

•   Do not follow the method of full charge and full discharge. It’s not good to let your cell phone’s battery run all the way down. Unlike nickel-based batteries (such as the NiCd or NiMH rechargeable AA batteries seen in most supermarkets), lithium-based batteries are designed to be charged early and often, and letting them get too low can damage the battery.

•   Switch off the vibrate function on your phone and just use the ring tone. The vibrate function uses a lot of battery power. Keep the ringtone volume as low as possible.

•   Turn off the phone’s backlight. If you have to use the backlight, many phones will allow you to set the amount of time to leave the backlight on. Shorten that amount of time.

•   Turn off Bluetooth. It will drain your battery very quickly.  Same goes for WIFI, GPS, and infrared capabilities, if your phone has these features built in. Keep them off except when you need them.

•   Use GSM rather than 3G – Using your phone in 3G / Dual Mode will drain the battery quicker than if you just use GSM mode – have a look at your phones spec and you’ll see it will quote two different battery life times – normally 50% more for pure GSM use.