Combine proper device use and care with a backup external battery and you’ll be prepared for anything!
If you’re like most people, you aren’t exactly sure how you would live your life without your cell phone. Of course, at the very core of that device is its battery. Although it is quite handy to have accessories such as a good quality external battery pack to give your device an extra boost when you’ve run the internal power dry, it’s still important to make sure that you’re treating your smartphone well and are making the right choices so that its built-in battery will live for as long as possible.
Give your smartphone battery a bit of care and it will treat you well in return.
Fortunately, when it comes to keeping lithium-ion batteries happy, it’s not really all that difficult. Just make sure to follow a few simple tips to make sure that you’ll be able to continue recharging for as long as you choose to keep the device.
Consider an external battery pack to back up your device and lengthen the life of its power source.
Naturally, the first rule of making sure that power bank lives a long life is to drain it less, if at all possible. The fewer times it needs to recharge unnecessarily, the longer you will have with it. So whether you need your device to last for an extra hour that day or whether you’re hoping that its battery will last for another few months out of its overall lifetime, it’s a good idea not to wander around with your GPS and WiFi enabled when you’re not using them. Keep them turned off until they’re needed and you’ll use far less power.
Next, you need to forget what you thought you knew about rechargeable batteries – at least when it comes to lithium-ion. Indeed, nickel-based batteries are subject to the “memory effect”, where you can “teach them” their full capability in terms of capacity by running them until they are completely empty and then charging them fully once again. That is not the case with modern cell phone batteries.
With lithium-ion power packs, it is important to try to keep them above a 50 percent charge as much as can be achieved. By fully draining them, it can actually damage the life of the battery – if done too frequently. For that reason, it’s a good idea to have a backup external battery pack on you if you think you’re going to need your device for more than half of its charge before you’ll be able to plug it in. Otherwise, keep your external battery charger with you so that you can juice it back up again whenever it is needed.
By combining those tips with an effort to keep your smartphone battery out of extreme heat and extreme cold, you’ll do a lot to make sure that it lives a lot longer.