Smartphones have hundreds of uses and applications that can do just about everything. But all of those gadgets and games come at a cost: space and battery power. Unfortunately, Smartphones only have so much space and energy to run off, and once that’s tapped, your phone can suffer. If your phone is running slower than it should, or dying constantly, it might be time to use some of these tips to extend your Smartphone battery life.
Spring Cleaning Tips to Extend Your Smartphone Battery Life
If you’re having problems with your phone dying frequently, try ridding your phone of the GPS feature and turning down the screen’s brightness.
Various apps that use GPS to find your location can cut your battery life, so instead manually search around your area. Another simple tool is lowering the brightness of your screen, it saves power and can extend your battery life in a pinch when you are running low and can’t charge up. Both of these features can be found and adjusted in your phone’s settings.
Some slightly less convenient options to prolonging battery life: reduce your screen lock time and turn off Bluetooth and WiFi.
Reducing your screen time to about 15 seconds or less can help keep your phone’s battery usage down, but could get annoying if you find yourself having to unlock your phone more often. Also, disabling Bluetooth and turning off WiFi radios when they aren’t in use can keep your phone kicking longer. If you frequently use either of these features, it could be a pain to repeatedly change the settings, but will be worth it if to save battery life. Again, both changes can be made in your phone settings.
Apps are one of the main features of Smartphones, but many of them don’t close once you exit out.
To close apps on an iPhone, double click the home button. A side bar will pop up on the bottom of the screen showing the apps that are currently running. This is a quick way to switch between apps, but if you hold one down, it will start shaking and show a delete sign. Then, move down the line deleting what you’re not currently using.
For Android, tap your menu button and then settings, applications, manage applications, and finally running. There you will see a list of running applications that can be closed by clicking force quit. Failing to close apps regularly can result in a slow phone with rapidly dropping battery power.
Some Smartphones have external SD cards that can be used to free up space on the internal hard drive.
Moving commonly used apps onto an SD card can open up internal phone space. Apps like the App 2 SD for Android can give you information on app size while also allowing you to easily transfer apps to the card.
Clear your cache.
Clearing your internet cache frequently will speed up Smartphones in general, but may slow down searches to frequently visited sights, a small price to pay for quicker applications. Each Smartphone has its own process for clearing the cache and instructions to do so can easily be found on the Smartphone’s website or online user guides.
Time to clear what you don’t need or use.
Several areas of a Smartphone can be gleaned for useless information, freeing memory space and increasing phone speed. First, look at unnecessary apps that you rarely use, think old games or quirky apps that you could live without.
Then, remove old photos and videos from your phone’s storage. Media that you still want to have access to can be saved to The Cloud, allowing access without taking up space on your Smartphone.
Finally, take a look at old contacts or text messages you don’t need to store. I know it can be hard to let go, but if you really don’t need that information, delete it. Removing old contacts can create buckets of space on your phone and removing old texts will increase phone speed.
If you’re curious as to where your memory is really being used, usage apps can be downloaded that give clear displays of what is taking up how much space.
For iPhones, try System Status. This 99-cent app monitors every nook and cranny of energy and space used on your phone. For Androids, download DiskUsage, a free app that will direct you to the apps and files taking up the most space.
What is your best advice for spring cleaning your Smartphone?
Author Bio
Lisa has recently flushed Angry Birds from her phone and has never felt better. When she’s not cleaning up her phone, she is a full time blogger for satellitetv.com: home to the best Dish internet bundles.
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