Don't use Bluetooth, only charge an empty battery, etc. People believe a lot of things about smartphone batteries. Many of them aren't true. Read on to learn more.
There’s a lot of perceived wisdom out there about smartphone batteries and how best to use them. It's understandable because battery life tends to be one of the biggest bugbears that smartphone users have. Unfortunately, a lot of that is stuff that was true for older batteries no longer makes sense. Even worse, some of it was quite simply never true. So, if you're doing any of the following things, you can stop. It is not doing what you think it is doing.
Did you know these battery-related things are all myths?
Never leave your phone on to charge all night
The myth here seems to be that it will somehow overload the battery and even make it explode. In reality, it's not a big deal. This was true of older models but is not an issue with modern batteries. These things are called smartphones for a reason. Your device will recognise when it is fully charged and simply stop charging.
Wait until your battery is completely empty before you charge it again
This is also a common, but wrong, belief. It’s another one of the things that was once true but is no longer applicable to modern phones. In the olden days, batteries that were charged when only partially empty would start to believe that was their total capacity, meaning that battery life would get shorter and shorter. However, the only batteries that did that were nickel-based batteries. These days we use lithium ion batteries in our smartphones, and here's the good news, new model batteries just don't do that.
Nowadays, it's actually much better to keep some amount of charge on your battery at all times. All batteries have a limited number of charge cycles before they will be irreparably kaput. When your phone completely runs out of battery and dies, that’s one cycle gone. It will become unstable if you let it empty completely too many times.
Don't use your phone while it is plugged in to charge
The belief is that this will cause the battery to overheat while you usage output is sucking power as fast as the battery can input charge. This one isn't a total myth. It's probably not a good idea to use your phone while it is plugged into a dodgy knock-off charger, but with official chargers and reputable off-brand chargers, you should be absolutely fine.
Having a bunch of apps running will quickly drain your battery
Nope. It's understandable that people continue to believe this, For starters it makes sense on your laptop, so why wouldn't it on your phone? Right? Wrong. Apps that are open but unused don't really put any strain on your device. What does put strain on it is reopening them all the next time you want to use them.
Shutting all your apps won’t improve battery life
You can save a lot of battery by turning off things like WiFi, Bluetooth and location services
Again, this used to be true, but shockingly enough, manufacturers do actually try to fix the things that were an issue in earlier models. So now the benefit you may receive from this is only minimal. Don't bother activating flight mode in a bid to extend your dying battery's lifespan.
Don’t bother switching on airplane mode to save power
Location services aren’t as power-hungry as you think
