Bad Battery Life

As many of us use our phones fairly constantly for various tasks throughout the day, it is important that the battery can last for considerable lengths of time.

Bad battery life can mean your phone takes an age to reach 100-percent charge or can simply never reach this point. It can also mean your phone seems to die far too soon despite having just been fully charged. When you’re on the go and need your phone to be in peak condition at a moment’s notice, this can be less than ideal.

How to Solve Issues with Battery Life

There are many ways to go about prolonging your battery life and preventing it from being drained too quickly. Here, we explain how you can begin ensuring your phone stays charged for longer.

Alter Settings

No matter which model you have, usually going to your phone’s settings will provide a wealth of information and should be your first port of call when aiming to solve a multitude of problems – not just those related to charging and battery life.

The following are some of the settings you should look to change if your battery is being drained too rapidly.

- Screen Brightness – Reducing brightness or setting it to ‘auto- brightness’ can help reduce the battery drain.
- Location Services – Turning these off in your privacy settings can stop apps from processing your location while running in the background and using up too much battery.
- Low Power Mode / Battery Saving Mode – This setting will halt unnecessary activity while on and is often the best option when you need your phone to remain usable in an emergency.
- Auto-Lock – Enabling this in your settings will ensure that you do not accidentally allow indefinite onscreen usage, which can be a massive drain on power.
- Battery Usage – For both iPhones and Androids, you can navigate through Settings – Battery - Battery Usage to see which apps are eating up your battery.

Regulate Apps and Background Activity

When you go to the battery usage settings, assess which apps are using up your battery. If you spot any apps that you don’t use ranking high on the list, consider deleting them as they may be running in the background without your knowledge. Keeping unnecessary background activity to a minimum is one of the best things you can do to prolong your phone’s battery life.

Live wallpapers and too many widgets can also drain your battery. Disabling these features if you have them will help your phone retain charge for longer.

Restart and Update Your Phone

Restarting and updating your phone can sometimes help fix issues with battery life. Manufacturers will often release new updates to fix potential bugs and problems, including issues with batteries being drained too quickly.

This is especially true of Apple – if you ever need to update your iPhone you can go to Settings General - Software Updates and review any available updates.

Contact Manufacturers

If a brand new phone is having trouble with charging and its battery life is being drained too quickly, you should get in touch with the manufacturers. It may be a more extensive problem with the hardware or new software updates that cannot be solved by altering your usage or settings.