Extending the Battery Life on Your Cell Phone

By Alika Salazar

Don’t you just love it when you’re in the middle of an important call or video game and your smart phone dies just before you finish? Of course not! While we cannot undo those unpleasant memories from our past, we can certainly prevent them from happening in the future.

The best tip I can recommend is to make sure your phone is 100% charged before you leave the house for the day. Most smart phones only take around two to three of hours to charge, so if you’re plugging it in overnight, you’re actually overcharging your phone and reducing the life of your battery. Instead of plugging it in overnight, try charging it as soon as you get out of bed in the morning. If you give yourself two to three hours to get ready for work, that should be enough time for your phone to receive a full charge.

While the cost of a new battery is relatively inexpensive (about $50); it can be an annoying inconvenience to have to embark on a shopping expedition in the middle of a work day. Besides, I can think of a lot of things I’d rather be doing with that $50 and I’m sure you can too!

Some people will power their phones off during the day to save battery life. While that practice does work, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse that strategy. Why? Because if an emergency occurred and someone needed to reach you immediately, you wouldn’t get the message until your phone was powered back on and you checked your messages.

Another practice to avoid is not charging your phone for an extended period of time, like several months. The longer you go without charging your battery, the greater the likelihood that it won’t take a charge anymore. When the battery can no longer be charged, it will have to be replaced.

If you take care of your battery, it should last two to three years, but I’ve seen several that only lasted about a year. I’ve actually seen some phones where the battery dies prematurely because it has literally expanded while still inside the phone. Some people believe that could be caused by leaving the phone in the sun, but I’m not sure if that’s always the case. I have noticed that this does happens on certain model phones, like the iphone 3GS, but not the 3G. It also happens occasionally on the iphone 5C and the 5S and it’s really common on the iphone 5. I believe that the most likely cause is a manufacturing flaw.