What I’m talking about is the daily life of your smartphone’s battery. Every smartphone has a different anticipated, average and not entirely satisfactory daily life. What that means is how long it will go between charges.
As an iPhone® user, I have to charge the phone’s battery just about every day and a half, depending on whether or not I’ve done something radical like used the phone, headset or checked my email. If I do something totally wild and crazy like surf the Internet or use Yelp to find someplace to take Vickie to dinner, the battery life is even shorter.
Under normal use, I get about 36 hours off a full charge, but Apple® recommends that you run the battery down below 20% before fully recharging it. If Certified Legal Nurse Consultants follow that rule, they’ll get just under a year of life out of the battery before it starts to degrade and last increasingly shorter periods of time. Worst of all, the iPhone battery is built in so I can’t swap it out myself. If you use your iPhone for your legal nurse consulting business and are pretty hard on the battery life, you might buy an extended life battery, but it ruins the phone’s looks by sticking out the bottom. Maybe you could buy a combination fat case and battery, which adds lots of juice and also ruins its look. I don’t know about my CLNC® amigos, but I’d rather be cool than ruin the image of my iPhone (besides nobody really knows if your phone is working or not except in a movie theatre).
Being cool means being prepared and this means I have a 12V charger in my car, charging cables attached to my home and work docks and keep a full wall wart charging set in my Codi® MobileMax rolling computer bag when I travel. Wherever your legal nurse consulting business takes you, take a minute to be prepared.
There are so many Android® phones out there that battery life and swappable batteries are too varied to write about. Instead, let me offer legal nurse consulting Androids this advice – carry at least one fully-charged spare battery, keep a 12V charger in your car and pack a spare wall charger with your travel stuff. Do this and you’ll never find yourself looking for a payphone again.
In the meantime, if you want to maximize your TTBC (Tom’s Time Between Charges) for any smartphone, follow these simple steps:
- Turn off the GPS except for those apps that really need it. If your GPS is on, your phone is either constantly pinging the global positioning system to tell people where you are or pings it every time you use certain apps. Turn it off except for essential apps like Fandango, Yelp, Zagat or others that help you find restaurants, gas or movies. Forget Google, Shazam, Dictionary and other apps that don’t need to know where you are to function properly. You do need your GPS for Facebook (at least for iPhone) if you’re posting a mobile upload. Otherwise, if checking in with FourSquare and becoming “mayor” of the local “Shake ‘n Steak” is important to you, get used to short battery life.
- Turn off your Wi-Fi – at least when you’re not using it. Wi-Fi is a nice feature that can save considerable costs off your cellular bill if you use it in a Starbucks®, hotel lobby or anywhere else that offers free Wi-Fi. However, the whole time you’re driving around or walking through Wal-Mart®, your phone is searching for a Wi-Fi signal, possibly asking you to join any networks it discovers and, at the same time, draining your battery. Instead, keep the Wi-Fi off and turn it on while you’re waiting in line for that double decaf skinny soy latte (with two Splendas) before going to see your favorite attorney-client or CLNC® subcontractor.
- Always keep your phone where you can see it. When your phone is buried in your purse or on the backseat or floor of your car, it’s looking for a signal. In fact, it’s straining to find a signal that’s being blocked by a couple of thousand pounds of heavy Detroit metal. This, of course, strains your battery. Instead, keep your phone on the dashboard or in one of the cup holders (where you can safely reach it when it goes off). Turn it off when you’re at an attorney-client’s office and when you’re at work.
- If you can adjust how quickly your screen goes to auto-lock or your screensaver kicks in, adjust it to the shortest period you can stand.
- Finally, turn down the screen brightness and then set it to auto-brightness. The lower your screen brightness, the lower your battery draw. You don’t have to turn it down to where you need to step into a dark stairwell to use it, but at least drop it from the brightest to about midway and keep reducing it until you find a level you can live with.
Try these five simple steps and all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants will get some extra life out of their smartphone batteries. I’m sure the day that important attorney-client returns your call and you have the battery bars to take it, you’ll appreciate this tip.
Keep on techin’,
Tom
P.S. Comment and share your own battery-saving tips.
