7 Biggest Battery-Saving Myths
BENGALURU: Despite the progress made in mobile phone technology with crisp, clear screens and faster chips, batteries have made a sluggish progress. This has propelled a greater desire for longer battery life among customers, when they decide to buy new smartphones.
“There’s a lot of investments on all fronts in improving the technology above and beyond that, but I don’t think we are going to see that hitting any kind of mass market for several years out,” said Charlie Quong, Executive, Mophie, a battery accessory maker. That means those old tips to increase your battery life just aren’t as true, yet we still share them as they are gospel. Before telling someone to disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, let’s shed some light on those old myths. With this subsistence backdrop, here are seven battery-saving myths, as compiled by Brian X Chen for New York Times.
Closing Unused Apps: There is plenty of inaccurate conventional wisdom about methods to prolong battery life. Closing or force-quitting apps you are not currently using. Well, that sounds true for a computer; same can’t be said about the smartphones. Once an app is no longer in the foreground-most or all of its processes are frozen. Or, to put it simply: While an app may still be loaded in a phone’s memory, it is probably not doing much to drain the battery.
Don’t Assume Turning Off Wi-Fi Will Always Help: The most common suggestion for extending the battery-life is to disable Wi-Fi. However, if you’re in the range of a strong Wi-Fi signal, your phone uses less energy to connect to the internet with a Wi-Fi connection than a cellular one. If you regularly use apps that rely on your location, having Wi-Fi enabled helps your phone determine its location without having to rely solely on power hungry GPS features, so it actually helps a battery last longer.
Avoid Disabling All Location Services: It seems like every new feature added to your smartphone is a serious threat to your smartphone’s battery life. Many apps that use your location do so only intermittently. If you are using your maps for navigation, that also doesn’t use more than a small capacity of your battery. To put it simply, don’t disable all your phone’s location based features just to extend your battery life. You won’t see a big jump in usage time, but you may end up disabling and subsequently missing out on interesting features.
Don’t Always Choose Wi-Fi over Cellular: It’s a common belief and many people claim that using a Wi-Fi consumes less power than using a cellular signal. So, one should use Wi-Fi whenever it’s available. But this is not the case. While testing in a location where both Wi-Fi and Cellular signals were strong, an hour of browsing over Wi-Fi used roughly the same amount of battery as an hour using LTE on an iPhone. In other words, as long as you have a good signal, you probably won’t see a huge difference between Wi-Fi and cellular data and probably it’s not worth the hassle of switching between the two.
Siri and Google at Your Command: Both iPhones and Android phones includes a hands-free feature for summoning their virtual assistants by speaking voice commands. You can just say ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘ OK Google’ and then speak your request or command. If you have a phone that supports this feature, disabling it won’t conserve much battery life. The result of Wirecutter’s testing with an iPhone 6S Plus and a Nexus 6P, there was a negligible difference between the two having the always-on virtual assistant enabled or disabled over a period of two hours.
Don’t Forgo Third-Party Chargers Made by Reputable Vendors: A common warning everywhere is that you should never go for third-party chargers as this could damage your phone’s battery. In reality the AC Adapters just convert AC current into low voltage DC current that it provides via a USB port. This is why you can charge your phone using the USB port on a computer, a USB battery pack or a charger in your car. While there’s some truth in the fact that cheap adapters can damage your phone. So, you should never go for cheap products that are sold online or at your local shopping mall kiosks.
Calibrate Only Occasionally: For many years, devices that used rechargeable batteries required ‘calibrating’, a process that prevented the battery from forgetting how much capacity it originally had. Most manufacturers still suggest you to ‘calibrate’ your battery by discharging it and recharging the battery once in every three months. More and more batteries have a digital calibrating tool built in them. These ‘smart batteries’ supposedly reduce the need to calibrate, though it is still recommended when your battery behaves oddly.
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