One of the biggest complaints people have about theirsmartphone is that the battery doesn’t last long enough. For many people, just making it through the day can be a challenge, which is why you see so many “How to make your phone’s battery last longer!” articles in your friends’ Facebook feeds. But many of the claims in those articles are specious at best, and some of the tricks they suggest could actually shorten your battery life. So which ones should you try
We partnered with The New York Times to find the answer by testing, on both Android and iPhone smartphones, a slew of procedures that people, publications, and—in some cases—smartphone manufacturers suggest for getting more use time out of your phone.1 The article on the NYT website includes a summary of our findings, but if you want to know more, read on for our extended recommendations.
Table of contentsBig battery suckersThe easiest solutionsUse the screen less—or at least turn brightness downUse an ad blockerSwitch from push to fetch email if you have many accounts or get lots of emailStore music locallyAvoid extreme temperaturesUse airplane mode or low-power mode (if you must)The next stepsDisable cellular or Wi-Fi when the signal is badConsult your phone’s battery-usage screen to find the biggest offendersDisable GPS or location services—but only for power-hungry apps or apps you don’t needDisable unnecessary push notificationsFor iPhone: Use Bluetooth instead of AirPlay to listen wirelesslyBattery-saving mythsMyth: Turn off BluetoothMyth: Turn off Wi-FiMyth: Close (quit) unused appsMyth: Use a battery-saving utility or task manager on AndroidMyth: Disable location services completelyMyth: Always choose Wi-Fi over cellularMyth: Disable Hey Siri or OK GoogleMyth: Calibrate your battery to extend its lifeMyth: Use only the charger that came with your phoneIf you still need more juice: Battery packs
Big battery suckersBefore we get into the specific changes—to settings or behavior—that you can make to extend your phone’s use time, we want to point out some activities that have a big impact on your battery. people engage in these activities regularly.
One is streaming video. Watching a movie on, say, Netflix requires your phone’s screen to be on continuously (the biggest battery drain), your phone to maintain an active Internet connection (another notable drain), and the phone’s processor and graphics processor to decode the video and audio. For example, we watched Pee-wee’s Big Adventure on Netflix with the volume and screen brightness both set at 50 percent. On an iPhone 6s Plus, streaming over Wi-Fi for an hour consumed 5 percent of a full battery; LTE streaming used 11 percent. On a Moto X Pure, Wi-Fi used 11 percent of a full battery, and LTE used 13 percent.
Similarly, when you’re using a mapping app for long navigation sessions, your phone’s screen is on and the app forces the phone’s GPS circuitry to refresh at a more frequent rate than in normal usage. Fi connections in order to aid in pinpointing your location.
If your battery is getting low, or if you need it to last longer on a particular day, avoid video streaming and GPS navigation unless you’re connected to a power source.
The easiest solutionsAnyone can make a few simple changes to their phone’s settings, or to their own behavior, that can have a significant effect on how much power a device uses.
Use the screen less—or at least turn brightness downThe component that uses the most energy on your smartphone, by a considerable margin, is the screen: The more you use it—for checking Facebook, streaming Netflix, texting with friends, whatever—the faster your battery drains. about running your battery down too quickly, limit the amount of time you’re actively using the phone (that is, with the screen on).
Of course, many of the things that you bought a smartphone to do require the screen. This tweak reduces the amount of time the screen is on each day. For example, if you unlock your phone 25 times per day, and your screen-lock delay is three minutes, changing the screen-lock setting to one minute can cut the time your screen is on by up to 50 minutes. On an iPhone, go to “Settings” then “General” then “Auto-Lock”; on an Android phone, go to “Settings” then “Display” then “Sleep.” , you can manually put the phone to sleep whenever you’re done using it.
When you are actively using the phone, you can extend the battery life by reducing screen brightness: In Wirecutter testing using the Geekbench utility’s battery-intensive routines for an hour, an iPhone 6s used 54 percent less battery—12 percent of a full charge versus 26 percent—with the screen brightness at minimum A Moto X Pure Edition Android phone used 30 percent less (21 percent of a full charge versus 30 percent).
battery saving tips auto brightnessThe screen where you enable the auto-brightness setting on an Android (left) and iOS (right) device.Using a dim screen in bright environments is tough, however, so most phones offer an auto-brightness mode that automatically adjusts the screen’s brightness based on ambient light: In bright environments, the screen gets brighter, in dim environments, it gets dimmer. a moderately well-lit office, our iPhone 6s test phone used only 16 percent of a full battery over an hour of the Geekbench stress test with auto-brightness on (with initial brightness set at 50 percent). similar test resulted in the phone’s using 25 percent of a full charge. In other words, enabling auto-brightness will save most people a good amount of battery life compared with setting it to a bright level all the time,though not as much as if you kept the brightness down all the time; the advantage of auto-brightness is that the screen will remain easily readable in all environments.
Use an ad blockerIf you spend much of your smartphone-screen time on the Web, one of the easiest ways to make your battery last longer may surprise you: Install an ad blocker. Much of the debate around using this kind of software, which is designed mainly to prevent certain kinds of ads from loading while you’re browsing websites, focuses on revenue (for publishers) and annoyance (for readers). But ads, just like any other form of online content, use resources: Your phone must download the ad images and video and then display them (often running browser scripts too), and these tasks use energy.
battery saving tips ad blockerThe Ghostery browser for Android (left) and the iOS screen for enabling an ad blocker (right).We ran an automated Wi-Fi Web-browsing session in Safari on an iPhone 6s, cycling through a set list of websites for two hours with no ad blockers; then we ran the same test with the 1Blocker ad blocker installed. , the test used 18 percent of the phone’s battery, but with the ad blocker, it used only 9 percent—so viewing ads doubled the impact of Web browsing on the phone’s battery! Ghostery Privacy Browser and got results that were even more dramatic: With no ad blocker, a two-hour browsing session in Chrome used 22 percent of the phone’s battery, whereas the Ghostery ad-blocking browser (which uses the same browser engine as Chrome) consumed only 8 percent.
Switch from push to fetch email if you have many accounts or get lots of emailA feature called push automatically delivers new email, new or revised calendar events, and updates to your contacts list (such as from a Gmail or iCloud account) to your smartphone whenever such changes occur on a central server. can use a goodly amount of power, as it requires your phone to always be listening for new communications from your account provider. Most phones let you configure them to use “fetch” instead, where the phone polls a server on a schedule—say, every 30 minutes—or only when you manually tell the phone to do so.
battery saving tips fetch emailMail-retrieval settings on an iPhone, with accounts set to fetch new mail every 30 minutes.If you have a single email account and you don’t receive much email, you won’t see a real difference in battery usage between push and fetch. those accounts receive, the more energy your phone will use, as it has to communicate with those account servers continually. accounts, receiving a total of 20 to 30 messages per hour. Over 24 hours with push enabled, Mail was active in the background for about 18 minutes. When we switched to a 30-minute fetch schedule, the same phone, handling roughly the same amount of email, was active in the background for only 4 minutes over 24 hours.It’s difficult to determine conclusively how much of Mail’s energy use is specifically attributable to communication with mail servers, but in these tests, having push active over the course of a day with this particular email load2 caused Mail to account for 5 to 10 percent more of the phone’s total battery use.
Anecdotally, during January’s Consumer Electronics Show, when Wirecutter staffers were receiving hundreds of press-release emails each day abled meant having to charge our smartphones by early afternoon; switching to fetch or manual allowed the same phones to survive well into the evening before needing a charge.
The manual setting will save the most battery life, but you likely won’t see a huge benefit over fetch, and you’ll lose the convenience of being notified of new mail and events on a regular schedule.
If you switch from push to fetch or manual, and you don’t notice an improvement in battery life after a few days of use, you might want to switch back to push for the convenience it offers. those email accounts on which you really do need to see messages immediately, using fetch or manual for the others.
