You have probably been there, done that; find yourself out and about with your phone battery meter bleeping warning signs. You look left, right, and center, but you can find a wall power outlet. There is also an important email, phone-call, or Zoom meeting you are waiting on. So how do you squeeze out more time out of your phone battery? Well, read on for battery saving tips for your iPhone.
Admittedly, OEMs like Apple could pack more capacity into their batteries. Then again that would perhaps mean more heavier-and-a-beefier iPhones, with a ridiculously steep rise in the price tag. The best hope we can cling on is that the battery making technology becomes even more efficient yet smaller in time. That is all for the future, but we are talking about the here and now. Below are several tips that could help you squeeze out more hours out of your iPhone.
1. Be sure ‘Optimized Battery Charging’ feature is turned on
With the release of iOS 13, Apple introduced a new feature called ‘Optimized Battery Charging.’ This feature is meant to minimize battery draining features on your phone, until such a time when you need to use them. It should be enabled by default if your iPhone is running iOS 13, but if you are reading this, it won’t hurt to double-check if the feature is turned on.
Go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health. If we could get into the geeky details of this feature, you might want to know that Lithium-ion batteries (like those used in iPhones) degenerate each time they are charged to full capacity. This new feature in iOS 13 monitors your smartphone usage, and will limit your battery re-charge to about 80%, until to a time when you typically pick up your iPhone. At which point, the phone will charge to maximum capacity.
2. OLED iPhone? Turn on Dark Mode
Unlike LED displays, OLED displays illuminate themselves, instead of relying on backlighting. That also means that their power consumption will vary depending on what they are currently displaying. Brighter colored content on your screen definitely suck up more juice out of your battery power.
It is therefore, advisable that you turn on dark mode to limit the ‘whiteness and brightness’ that eat up too much battery. Turning on dark mode will considerably give you more hours between successive battery recharges.
You can turn on dark mode by going to Settings > Display, and some experts claim doing so will give you extra 30% savings on battery.
3. Profile the Battery Hogs applications and Eliminate them
A smartphone by default has a lot of background program going on, even while you are not using the device. The more these program are running at a given time, the faster your battery drains. Terminating some of these background programs — especially the unnecessary ones — goes a long way in giving your more hours between successive battery recharge.
To identify programs that are hogging up your battery juice, you can go to Settings > Battery and give it a couple of seconds for a list to pop-up at the bottom of the screen. The list will display the percentage battery usage for each application running on your iPhone. The data will show usage for each app over the last 24 hours or the last 10 days.
This information should guide you in making the right choice as to which application(s) ought to be terminated. Obviously, the programs you don’t needs should be first to be terminated.
4. Limit Notifications
Our phones keep us constantly connected, and on an information superhighway. However for that function to run properly, your phone needs to be constantly connected to the internet. That means the push notifications works by your iPhone constantly accessing the internet, downloading some content, then waking up your screen, followed by either a bleep or vibration if not both.
Terminating some of the non-essential notification will go a longways in conserving your iPhone battery. Go to Settings > Notifications and look up on the list of incoming notifications. You can then decide which applications you can do without and turn them off.
5. Enable ‘Low Power Mode’ whenever battery’s running low
When your battery is running low, you can enable the ‘Low Power Mode’ to slow down on the programs and features heavily feasting on battery power. Thereby stretching out the little remaining battery power over a couple more minutes, perhaps even hit an hour. You can enable this function by going to Settings > Battery and when you enable ‘Low Power Mode,’ your iPhone will go into power-saving mode that entails:
* Reducing display brightness
* Minimize the time it takes for the screen to turn off
* Disable auto-fetching of new emails
* Kill most background activities
* Dampen down the speed at which the CPU and GPU are running
6. Remove the iPhone case when charging
Ideally, the purpose of iPhone cases is to protect the device from damage if it drops onto any hard surface. However, on the appletoolbox.com website, the company advises users to remove any iPhone external casing before charging. The manufacturer attributes this to battery health. Apple indicated that keeping the phone case on during charging times could cause heat buildup, leading to battery deterioration. With this information, you can improve your iPhone’s battery performance.
Wrapping Up
The above-mentioned battery saving tips for your iPhone, will go a longways to giving you more up-time on your smartphone. These tips could be particularly useful if you are traveling to a remote region without reliable power source.
