The Lifestyler: Smart Phone battery Blues

Smartphones these days all use Lithium-ion batteries.  These batteries are good for about 500-1000 charges. So if you charge your phone 1-2 times a day a battery will last about 18 months.  The battery’s life is actually 3-5 years but the performance of the battery drops over time! Thus when new you should have access to 100% capacity but 12 months later you may only have access to 70% capacity if you are a very heavy user.

So has the LifeStyler confused you?  Think of it like 100 buckets of water. Each bucket can only ever be filled say 700 times.  After 700 fills the bucket no longer holds water.  If we line our buckets up in order and always use the water in order from bucket 100 then 99 then 98 etc.  We then fill those buckets up with water it means bucket98, 99 and 100 are the first to wear out.  Thus a phone battery is the same and after charging 700 times the most often charged cells no longer work. But the cells that rarely get charged still work fine.

So what can you do? 

1. Buy a new battery.

2. Look after your battery from day one. 

Lithium-ion batteries don’t like high heat so don’t leave your phone in a hot car. Don’t charge your phone when the phone feels hot.  Charge the phone regularly (but not constantly). Avoid allowing the battery to fully discharge.

Don’t leave your phone on charge once full (charger dependent) i.e. overnight.  Failure to do this may damage cells in the battery resulting in reduced performance.

Turning your phone off when you go to bed will also increase its life and has the added benefit of improving software performance due to the reboot.

Other ways to conserve your phone’s power include, switching any manufacturer-supplied energy-saving functions on, shutting down apps when finished with them rather than leave them running in the background and turning off Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth when not in use. We have a tendency to just run everything whether we need it or not.

The University of Michigan has produced this handy chart to prove there is some merit in the Lifestyler’s advice.

Follow this simple advice and get better performance from your valuable smartphone.  Cheers!