Is your smartphone still losing battery life too quickly? I have a few more tips to try extend the life of your battery.
- Turn off background refresh (iOS 7)
Background refresh is a new feature that iOS7 introduced that allows you to run apps in the background while you multitask and continually refreshes content. It would be super great, if it wasn’t so battery intensive!
How to turn it off: in iOS 7, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh, and turn app refresh off.
- Turn off animated backgrounds and Parallax
You can have a wallpaper on Android that moves which is called a “Live Wallpaper”, or, on the newer iPhones, you can have a background image that moves when you move your device. I find this really gimmicky, though I might look to use it more if it didn’t hog all my battery.
How to turn it off:
In iOS 7, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion, and slide on.
In Android, go to Settings > Display > Wallpaper, and de-select a Live Wallpaper!
- Remove push notifications you don’t need
Don’t need Foursquare push alerts to your mobile phone? Then it’s probably best to turn them off; otherwise they’re drain your battery. There will be some notifications you just can’t live without (mine is Twitter) but there will likely be plenty, like notifications that your lives have been restored on a mobile game, that you can turn off without any loss of function. For example, I’ve re-trained myself to manually fetch my emails for my personal account rather than having emails notify me during the day. It’s not only a great productivity tip if you’re often tempted to check or clear notifications straight away, but it helps save your battery – that’s what we call a win-win situation.
How to change your push notifications:
iPhone - Settings > Notifications, and then tailor to your heart’s content.
Android - Settings > Account Settings > Notifications
- Buying a new phone?
If you’re looking at getting a new gadget, make sure you do your research and see what people’s comments about the device’s battery life are before you go ahead and purchase it. A number of new smartphones, like the HTC One and Sony Xperia series, have in-built power-saving features, and from talking to friends who have these phones, I’ve got the impression that this feature works very well.
That’s all for now. Have a battery-saving tip that has really worked for you? Ping me something through on email or on Twitter.
