10 Ways to Make Your Cell Phone Battery Last Longer

Most of the new smartphones are real battery hogs. Those large, vibrant displays and fast processors can suck down your battery in a matter of hours under heavy use. So what can you do about it?

Well, I usually bring a portable battery-powered charger for my iPhone with me when I leave the house. It easily fits in my purse and provides another 4-6 hours of charge when I need it.

But sometimes I forget the charger and need to go to plan B, shutting down some of the functions on my phone to keep my battery alive. Try these steps if you're stuck with a fast-fading battery and need to make your phone last longer.

1. Turn off your GPS when using maps and unless you are actively using your cell phone for navigation or other services that require it. Let your phone use cell towers, instead, to update your position.
2. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when not being used.
3. Anything that vibrates your cell phone—vibration email alerts, vibration ring tones, haptic feedback—will use up power. Turn off vibration unless you really need it.
4. Turn down the updating frequency for all of your applications: email, Facebook, Twitter etc. Do you really need to get Facebook updates every 10 minutes?
5. Web browsing, streaming video and other apps that pull data from the Internet use a lot of power. Cut back to save your battery.
6. Turn down your screen’s brightness. Even the lowest setting is often plenty bright on many cell phones.
7. Set your screen to time out in one minute or less. The big, bright screens on smartphone are often the single biggest drain.
8. If you’re in an area with no signal, put your phone in "airplane mode" or turn it off. There's no point having your phone waste power looking for a signal when there isn't one.
9. If you have a "4G" phone, turn off 4G and have it use 3G networks for data transfer.
10. Avoid applications that are heavy users of the phone's processor, especially playing games and watching videos.

Phones and Mobile, Phone Accessories, Cell Phones, Tips & How-Tos, Tech 101