Tips for Ensuring a Longer Battery Life in Your Phone

Date Posted:30 May 2012 

There are a great many tips and tricks for making your mobile phone battery last longer between each charge, but there are also a number of ways you can make it last longer between replacements. Here are some simple things you can do to prolong the life of your phone’s portable power supply.

Initialise

Make sure you always initialise a new phone battery. This means making sure that it is fully charged (at maximum capacity) before you use it for the first time. Initialising times vary, but they are generally agreed to be five to six hours for lithium-ion batteries and around 16 hours for nickel-based batteries (used in older mobile phones).

Temperature

Batteries do not like heat, and prolonged exposure to high temperatures will shorten their lives. If you have a spare battery for your phone, it’s a good idea to either store it at room temperature (at 40 per cent discharge) or in the fridge in an airtight container, remembering to let it sit at room temperature for an hour before using it. The cold won’t hurt it and it will last longer as a result. Also, don’t leave your phone (and hence your battery) in a hot car or exposed to strong sunlight. Even your body temperature will shorten battery life, so take it out of your pocket whenever you can.

Capacity

Rather than buying a spare battery for your mobile phone, consider getting one with a larger capacity. This is because the spare battery will only have roughly the same lifespan as the one in use, so both will wear out at roughly the same time. A larger capacity battery will be more expensive, but not as expensive as buying two batteries.

Recharging

Recharge lithium-ion batteries while they still have one bar remaining on the meter of your portable phone charger. Never let them run out fully, as this shortens their life each time it happens and reduces the total number of charges you will get from them. After 30 charges, however, experts recommend that you then almost completely discharge the battery (never fully discharge lithium-ion batteries) in order to recalibrate the power gauge, which loses accuracy through continuous partial discharging.

Cleaning

Periodically clean the contacts on your battery and your mobile phone, as corrosion can build up and reduce efficiency, causing the battery to wear out quicker. Use nail polish remover and a Q-tip to clean the contacts and be careful not to damage the casing (nail polish remover is a solvent).

Handling

It goes without saying that you should handle your mobile phone with care. It is a delicate instrument with fragile components that could easily be damaged with rough treatment. The same goes for your phone battery as well. Batteries are very complex structures these days and any rough treatment could damage your battery and shorten its life.

Replacement

Eventually, no matter how well you look after it, your mobile phone battery will die and you will need to replace it. Indications that it is on the way out can include a shorter time period between each charge, a warm casing when recharging and a slight bulge developing on one side of the casing.