Month: September 2023

One of the most common reasons for replacing a smartphone is that the battery does not hold a charge, making it impossible to use the phone for any length of time away from a charging station.

Your iPhone battery’s long lifespan depends on how you care for it, so you are not unexpectedly let down when you need your phone the most.
In this article we’ll be looking at two distinct issues:
“iPhone Battery life” refers to the time you can use the phone before the battery needs to be recharged.“iPhone Battery lifespan” refers to the lifetime of the iPhone battery until it will no longer hold a charge and must be replaced.

What causes an iPhone battery to stop charging?The Lithium-ion battery installed in your iPhone is a consumable part that becomes less effective as the chemicals within the battery age. This means that the lifespan of a battery is related more to its “chemical age” than the length of time since it was built.
Its chemical age is derived from many things, including temperature fluctuations and the charging pattern that you follow. As the chemical age increases, the effectiveness of the battery decreases, which results in a shorter period in which it holds a charge.
Your iPhone contains electronic components that must be able to draw power from the battery. Impedance, or internal resistance, is the term used to indicate that your battery is not supplying the power the electronics require. Impedance increases with chemical aging, but it can temporarily increase when it has a low charge or is in freezing temperatures.
These traits are common to all lithium-ion batteries.

iPhone battery durabilityThe battery in an iPhone will accept between 500 and 800 battery cycles or full charges before the capacity drops to around 80%.
A battery cycle is when the user drains a percentage of the battery, charges it to 100%, and then uses it. For example, if you drain the battery down to 40%, recharge it, and then drain it to 60%, you have completed one cycle.
For most users, this represents approximately two years of use, which is why most people believe that the lifespan of a phone is two years. However when it comes to iPhones, you can expect between three to five years (maybe more) with proper care .
What does sustainability actually mean for smart devices? Our white paper presents facts and figures on the production and usage of smartphones and tablets worldwide. Click for the free PDF download.

Tips to extend an iPhone battery lifeFew things are more frustrating to users than having their iPhone’s battery die when they need it most. The battery on an iPhone should last between 10 to 17 hours on a full charge.
If your staff is constantly plagued with users complaining that the iPhone battery of the company phone is not holding its charge, share these hints and tips for extending the iPhone battery life.

iphone-battery-long-lifespan
Change the screen brightnessThe backlight is used to illuminate the phone’s screen, but it uses a great deal of energy. Go to the phone’s settings and find the display settings. Adjust the screen’s brightness or select dark mode, which switches off the backlight. If neither of these appeals to your preference, set the phone’s screen to auto-brightness. The device will then set the brightness on the screen to the ambient light level.
Turn off location servicesAn iPhone will use its inbuilt antenna and GPS software along with wi-fi or the cell network to accurately identify the device’s location. This all uses considerable amounts of energy, draining the battery. Either go to settings and turn off the location setting so none of the applications on the phone can exploit this, or alternatively, leave the global location setting turned on but turn it off for apps that are used infrequently. You can turn it on when using that app and turn it off again when you are finished.

Turn off push notificationsThe Push Notification on an iPhone will alert the user to any change on any of their cloud-based data, such as email. Push is a power-hungry application, so turn this off and instead use Fetch to bring data down to the phone manually .
Make sure the user understands that this will disable notifications for new mail. They will only realize there is new mail when they open their mail application.

Close unused appsAdvise your users to close applications once they are finished with them. All open apps use power, so users must get into the habit of closing apps when they have finished using them.
Turn off bluetoothIf the user is not explicitly using this for hands-free or speakers, turn it off to save power.
Turn off Wi-FiTurn Wi-Fi off unless the phone is specifically using a Wi-Fi network. The phone will continually scan to find a Wi-Fi network to use if this is left on, draining power from the battery.

Check the Reception QualityWhen the phone is on in poor or very low reception quality areas, the phone will use considerable amounts of power to try and establish a connection. Ask your users to check the bars at the top of the screen, and in poor reception areas, turn on the Airplane Mode setting to prevent the phone from searching for reception. This will save battery life, especially if the phone is also trying to establish connections for push notifications.
Tips for extending the lifetime of a battery for an iPhoneThis section contains tips for lengthening the lifetime of an iPhone battery with sustainable smartphone practices and improving the iPhone battery’s durability.

What does sustainability actually mean for smart devices?

Our white paper presents facts and figures on the production and usage of smartphones and tablets worldwide. Click for the free PDF download.
iPhone: optimized battery chargingThis is an important feature that will help with charging the battery efficiently. This clever feature will reduce the time that your phone battery spends charged to 100% by learning your phone habits. Based on your past usage, it will then ensure that the battery is fully charged when you are most likely to need it.

Check the phone while chargingSome cases retain heat while the phone is charging. This can cause problems as described above. Feel your phone while it is charging and if it is hot, remove it from its case while charging.

Battery usage information
The iPhone has a lot of important battery information available in the Settings. Ensure that any new user knows about this setting and how to read and interpret the information displayed. This will help extend the lifespan of the battery.Conclusion
Passing on these tips to your users will help them with their iPhone battery durability and give their iPhone batterya long lifespan. Saving the battery from being charged every day can significantly lengthen the battery’s lifespan, but that will only happen if the user is careful about the usage of the available energy.

Cell phone battery power can be a precious commodity,especially during summer. Changing a few settings on your phone can be the difference between your battery lasting through the day or going dark.
Our cell phones are such a huge part of our lives that seeing 7% on the battery indicator can be as alarming as feeling ourselves about to pass out. But while we all know what to do to boost our own energy, it’s not always obvious how to keep our handheld devices fully (or partially) charged.
To that end, DealNews has gathered up the 10 best tips for squeezing extra life out of your phone’s battery.

Knowledge is power! Before you start tweaking things to extend your battery life, see where your power is going. This process varies a bit from phone to phone, but in general:
Android phones: Settings > BatteryiPhones: Settings > Battery > Battery UsageThis will give you an idea of ​​what your biggest drains are and let you effectively target your battery conservation efforts.

Reduce Screen BrightnessManually reducing your screen brightness is one of the most effective things you can do to improve battery life, though you’ll likely have to manually increase it again when you’re outdoors in order to read the screen. Some people have found they can nearly double their battery life by going from maximum to minimum brightness.

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Note that you must change this manually. You may be familiar with your phone’s “auto-brightness” feature and assume it’s already managing this for you, but that’s not the case. While this setting will change your brightness for you (and save battery when you’re in low-light situations), it’s still usually a battery drain.

Why? When auto-brightness is on, the phone is constantly checking its sensor data and doing calculations to determine the appropriate brightness, which often takes nearly as much energy as the feature is saving (or more!).
Turn Off Unused HardwareGPS is usually the largest and most noticeable battery drain, but Bluetooth, WiFi, and your mobile data antennae use power, too. While you may be loath to cut yourself off from the world, you probably aren’t using WiFi during your nature hike , and some people may rarely or never use Bluetooth. If power’s tight, cut down your data links to what you’re really using. It might not save a ton of energy, but every little bit helps.
Turn Off the Vibrate FeatureThe motor that makes your phone vibrate actually takes a fair amount of juice to power, and can drain your battery quickly. If you’re low on battery, make do with visual or audio alerts.

Limit Background Data UsageYou may be spending battery power running apps in the background. Some may be apps you downloaded and forgot about. Others may have been installed on your phone before you got it. Check what’s running on your phone right now and shut down (or uninstall) anything you don’t need all the time.

Android phones: Press the task-switching button to see what’s currently runningiPhones: Double-tap the home buttonTurn off NotificationsDo you really need to know instantaneously when someone has “liked” your Facebook status? OK, maybe you do. But if you can wait until you open the app to get updates, you’ll save a little juice. Many of your apps will fetch fresh data on their own without interaction from you. You may need to leave some of them running (like your email), but you may be able to do without others, like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Android phones: Settings > Apps. Then choose individual apps and uncheck “Show notifications”iPhones: Settings > General > Background App RefreshYou may find you can further preserve battery life through individual app settings. For example, you could reduce email sync frequency or disable auto-upload of photos.

Keep Your Apps UpdatedThis one’s simple enough: Make sure you’re running the most recent version of all your favorite apps. Developers often optimize old code to run more efficiently.

Enable “Power Saving Mode” (If You Have One)Not every phone has a power saving mode (iPhones running older operating systems don’t), but if yours does, it can be a quick way to dramatically decrease your drain in a pinch. Check your “Settings” menu to see if the option is listed.
Beat the HeatWhile it might not make a difference to an individual charge, heat can degrade battery performance over time. Try not to leave your phone lying in direct sunlight, and consider changing or removing your case if you frequently notice it running hot.

Don’t want to fiddle with all these settings? Pick up a portable charger and keep it topped off, so you always have an extra power source in a pinch. Many modern cell phones have between 2,500mAh and 3,000mAh batteries, and DealNews regularly lists battery backups even above that range for under $10.
If you’re willing to pay a bit more, you can easily find portable power banks that have 20,000mAh or more. That’s enough for a day’s use of even the most power-hogging applications, or more moderate use for extended periods — such as camping trips or power outages.

That phone in your pocket is a modern miracle. Ditto the laptop on your desk, the tablet in your backpack, maybe even the watch on your wrist. And regardless of what each is capable of, they all have one cornerstone component to thank, one that you probably ought to know how to take care of: A battery.

The first step to knowing your device’s battery is to narrow down the kind. The first kind you might think of (and the kind you probably grew up with) are nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH batteries. These, generally, are the ones that look like a normal disposable batteries, except you can plug them into a wall charger for some extra juice whenever your TV remote dies.

The batteries in your modern-day gadgets—from iPhones to laptops to Bluetooth headphones to tablets—are a different beast entirely. These are lithium-ion (aka li-ion) batteries, and they have some pretty significant advantages over NiMH and other rechargeable batteries that came before. Lithium-ion batteries are also totally different from straight-uplithium batteries,which aren’t rechargeable.

That old saw about how you always need to charge your battery all the way up, and use it until it’s dead? Memory effect, as it’s called, affects NiMH batteries but it doesn’t apply to your phone. In fact, you’re phone’s battery hates when you do that. Similarly, lithium-ion batteries don’t need to be “calibrated” with a full charge and a full discharge when they’re new.
Li-ions can pack a lot of power into a small size, and they don’t lose too much of that energy to leakage when they’re not in use. It’s a combination of these factors that make them great for your portable gadgets.

How does a lithium-ion battery work?All batteries work by having two electrodes—an anode and a cathode—with a bunch of a material called electrolyte between. When you plug a battery into a completed circuit, a chemical reaction starts taking place at the anode and electrons start building up over there . Those electrons want to travel to the cathode, where it’s less crowded, but the electrolyte between these two parts keeps the electrons from taking the short way there. The only way through is the circuit that the battery is crammed into, and those electrons power your device in the process. Meanwhile, the positively charged lithium ions the electrons leave behind travel through the electrolyte to meet the electrons on the cathode side.

Once all the electrons have made the trip, your battery is dead. Except! If you’re using a rechargeable battery like a lithium-ion, you can reverse the process. If you dump energy into a circuit using a charger, you can force the reaction to go in the other direction and get that electron party at the anode all crowded again. Once your battery is recharged, it’ll mostly stay that way until there’s something for it to power again, though all batteries leak some charge over time .

What determines the capacity of the battery—how long it can power your stuff—is the number of lithium ions that can nestle themselves into the tiny, porous craters of the anode or the cathode. Over time, with repeated charge the anode and the cathode degrade, and can’t fit as many ions as they used to. As that happens, the battery stops holding a charge as well as it once did.
How does a lithium-ion battery recharge?

It’s easy to think of charging a battery as though you’re filling a tub with “power.” Just hook up the hose until it’s full! From the outside, that’s exactly how it works, but on the inside it’s a little more nuanced.

A lithium-ion battery typically charges in two stages. First comes the process called constant current charging. This is the part that really is pretty simple. The charger for your phone or tablet will apply a steady current of electricity to the battery to get all those electrons back to the anode. During this stage, the charger just decides how much power is coming out of the firehose and starts spraying. The higher that constant current, the faster the battery can charge. High-voltage quick chargers—like the ones that are starting to come with a lot of new phones—take advantage of this first stage to cram in the juice as quickly as possible (at the cost of a bit of extra stress on the battery).

When the battery is 70 percent recharged, the procedure changes and flips over to constant voltage charging. During this second stage, the charger makes sure that the voltage—that is, the difference in current between the battery and the charger—stays the same rather than keeping the current constant. Practically, this means that as the battery gets closer to full, the current the charger sends into it decreases. As the battery gets full, the rate at which it charges slows down. Once you reach 100 percent, the charge simply trickles in, just enough to account for the tiny, tiny bit of charge your battery loses naturally over time.

So what about over charging? al writer for iFixit, who explained why.
All modern Li-Ion rechargeable devices have some sort of power management IC, designed to prevent overcharging the battery. They’ll keep your phone battery topped off and ready to go throughout the night with a trickle charge at most.

No matter how many times you bring it back to life, your battery will die someday, or at least degrade into a shadow of its former self. That’s unavoidable. Most lithium-ion batteries have a rated lifetime of somewhere between 500 and 1,500 charge cycles .
One cycle is just one bout of discharging, but how much energy you discharge in one go—a measure referred to as depth of discharge (DoD)—matters bigtime. Lithium-ions really hate a deep depth of discharge. According to Battery University, a staggeringly exhaustive resource on the topic, a li-ion that goes through 100 percent DoD (the user runs it down all the way to zero before recharging) can degrade to 70 percent of its original capacity in 300-500 cycles. With a DoD of 25 percent, where the user plugs it in as soon as it gets to 75 percent remain, that same battery could be charged up to 2,500 times before it starts to seriously degrade.

What’s far more dangerous to a battery’s well-being is heat. Lithium-ion batteries despise heat. A li-ion battery that’s been exposed to temperatures of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a year will lose about 40 percent of its overall charge capacity. 75 degrees, it’ll lose only about 20 percent.
Something that’s not an issue is overcharging. Contrary to what you might think (or have been told), leaving your phone or laptop plugged in all the time is not bad for its battery. That’s because your gadgets, the batteries in them, and the chargers you attach them to are actually pretty smart about the way they do business.

Trickle charge—what your battery gets when it’s connected and full—is way less distress to the battery’s health than a larger discharge would be.