Fusion Wireless: Your Wireless Experts

Many customers ask us the best practices for preserving and extending the life of their cell phone batteries. We don’t expect you to follow ALL of these tips, but following several of them should still prolong the life and performance of your battery.

Condition Your Battery
Lithium ion batteries are most frequently used in cell phones today. When you first receive your new handset, charge it for five to six hours at a time and always recharge it when you have one bar of battery life remaining– avoid charging the phone if there is more than one bar of charge available. This is most important the first few charge cycles because it “conditions” the battery. Cell batteries contain memory and are designed to fully charge when they are plugged in. For example, frequently charging the battery at half power conditions it to only hold a partial charge and stop charging fully if it’s drained all the way. The average cell phone battery charge lasts three days, so with consistent use you should try not to charge your phone more than once every other day.

Also, when storing a battery for a long time make sure that it does not have a low charge. 40% capacity in a cool environment is best for prolonged storage.

Use Power Saving Functions Already in Your Phone
Many AT&T phones come with a power save function within their menus. You can contact any Fusion Wireless communications consultant to help you find this function if you need.

If your phone does not have this function, there are still plenty of default features on your phone that you can turn off. For starters, a phone’s vibrating feature is a huge tax on the life of your battery, and letting your phone ring AND vibrate at the same time is even worse. A ringer at a low volume OR a low vibrate is best for the phone, but you will find that your battery will last a bit longer with just the low ring.

Next, turning off or shortening the duration of your phone’s backlight will also greatly help your battery life. We understand that sometimes turning off the backlight entirely in certain conditions is impractical, but shortening the light to one or two seconds should be fine.

If you have a smartphone, it may be constantly checking for e-mails, messages, and application updates. As you can imagine, this is also very taxing on your battery. Setting your smartphone to check for these things once every 10-30 minutes is recommended. Make sure that you also close applications and websites when they are not in use as your smartphone may reload them after certain intervals of time.

Finally, many phones like BlackBerrys now come with an auto-power feature, where you can set your phone to automatically shut on and off at specific times. You may want to consider setting this feature for when you are sleeping or at work and know that you will not be making or receiving calls.

Limit Feature Use
Phones today come with all kinds of bells and whistles. It’s difficult to find a phone without a camera or internet access these days. However, limiting your use of these features and just using your phone as a phone will keep you charging it a lot less. Did you know that texting or e-mailing uses two to four times MORE battery life than making a quick call to relay the same message?

Turning off your Bluetooth headset or 3G network connectivity when not in use will result in a happier battery. Try to use a corded headset as much as possible if you frequently talk hands-free for better performance.

Especially for times when you know you will be unable to charge your phone for a while, limit using a camera (especially with a flash or video capability), browsing the internet or playing a game as much as possible. Also, disable those animated wallpapers and use a static photo as a background instead– they use up a lot of power!

Keep In Mind
There are many other tips to keep in the back of your mind as you continue to use your cell phone:

When you notice that you have limited or no service coverage in an area and you know what you will be in that area for a while, consider turning your phone off. If it is left on it will struggle to look for service.

Keep your phone and its battery(s) in a cool place. Your phone’s performance will be best at room temperature. Try not to leave your phone in a hot car, direct sunlight, or even in your pocket if you can avoid it. Your body heat will cause the battery to diminish faster. Also keep in mind that you should not charge your battery with a car charger until the interior or your car has cooled down.

Clean the contacts on your battery every once in a while with a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol. Keeping the contacts clean lets your battery run a lot more smoothly.

If you have a smartphone, update its operating system as much as you can. Many times updates include power consumption improvements.

Cell phones need to work harder when more people are accessing the network at once. It seems silly, but calling your night owl friends at 3AM will be easier on your phone than calling them at peak evening hours. Also, making a call in a park with less people around is better than calling someone in a crowded mall where more people are using their handsets.

Even though we recommend not letting your battery run completely out of juice, Isidor Brachmann, CEO of Cadex Electronics (a battery equipment testing vendor) advises that running your battery down completely, letting your phone die and charging it back up completely every few months is good “battery housecleaning.” This allows your cell phone to provide more accurate battery life readings.

In Conclusion
Again, it would probably be more hurtful to your sanity than helpful to your cell phone’s battery to follow every single one of these tips. However, keeping some of them in mind and following just a few may help extend the life of your battery… overall and between each charge. If you feel like you still need a boost when it comes to the power capacity of your phone, however, Fusion Wireless offers home and car chargers, spare batteries, and battery boosters for many phones. Contact any of our communications consultants or stop in at one of our locations for more details. May your cell phone battery live long and prosper!