How to preserve your phone's battery life: Talking Tech podcast
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Hey there listeners. It's Brett Molina, welcome back to Talking Tech. There is nothing worse or more annoying or more frustrating than when you have your phone and your battery's about to run out. It's also annoying too when you think your battery is like half full, and then you realize... you look over and it's like a 20% and you're like, "I have barely been using this, why's this happening."
It's so frustrating and especially when you... I feel like it always happens when you need your phone the most. Like when you actually need to check an email or you're waiting for a phone call, you look over and your phone's at 1%, or it's about to die, or it's dead. That's never fun. But there are some steps you can take to get control of the apps on your phone and to preserve some important battery life.
My colleague and Tech columnist Jennifer Jolly writes about this in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. It's titled, why you shouldn't close idle apps in other ways to save your phones data and battery.
The first step. Stop force closing your apps. Which I know sounds weird because you have a ton of apps open and you do that little swipe move on your phone, to pull them all up and you want to do that kind of quick swipe to close them down. And you would think that it kind of makes your phone move faster, stuff like that, right? Not necessarily. Usually your phone is equipped to handle when all these apps are sitting there idle.
So, where the problem comes in though with battery is, if you're force closing these apps, when you go back to reopen them, it is trying to pull in all that data that was lost when you closed it, which means that it's using up more battery just to get the app running again. So I know there's an urge to close all those apps and swipe up to close them. Don't do it, just leave it alone.
Another tip that Jennifer gives. Turn off background refresh for apps. Basically what it does is you can... It'll basically automatically update all the different apps on your phone. Which is fine, but part of the problem is, that also sucks up a ton of battery. So, turn that off. An Android it's nice, because they have a feature called adaptive battery which Jennifer explains. And it talks about, how it takes care of a lot of those issues and what it can do is, it will limit how your phone uses battery for apps and in that way, if you're not using certain apps or you rarely use them, it's not going to use as much juice to help power those apps.
One of the last tips that she offers is, downloads. I do this with Spotify. I have playlists that I really like, I just downloaded in my phone. It saves battery life because it's playing directly from the phone as opposed to streaming, and streaming soaks up a little more battery life than it would if you just had to download direct. So when there are opportunities where you know you're going to be somewhere for a while and you want to have a TV show that you'll watch, where you can, download it. Just download it to your phone if you have the space, it saves some battery life, gives you a little bit extra so you don't have to run into that situation where your battery's dead and you need to get an important phone call.
You can read more of Jennifer's tips in her column on tech.usatoday.com. Listeners let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, show ideas, any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @brettmolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You've been listening to Talking Tech, we'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.