Help! I need to charge my phone!

With more apps being installed on handsets, and more usage of apps throughout the day, the natural casualty is your phone’s battery – it’s much more unlikely for a full charge to last through the day.

We’re not going to tell you to uninstall things, or how to use your apps <grin!>. But we thought of sharing some common-sense, good-practice tips to help you get a few more hours from a full charge of your handset.

Are You Sure You Need That App?

And if you do, are you sure you want to give it access to your location data, and to send you push-notifications? Keep in mind that these settings can be configured for every app you install. 

So even if you needed to allow location access and push-notifications when installing, you can always change the settings later.

Background App Refresh & Idle/Inactive Apps 

The default settings for most apps allow them to refresh data even if they’re in the background, i.e. when you’ve not explicitly closed/killed the app. So the ride-sharing app you ran in the morning is likely to be still using up data and battery all through the day By allowing only selected apps to refresh app data even when in the background, this largely gets handled. And of course, periodically killing any idle apps that are in background.

Change the Screen Brightness

You might not notice much of a difference in screen brightness once your eyes adjust, but a change in screen brightness can significantly affect your battery life. As an alternative to setting the screen’s brightness yourself, you can let your device do it automatically. 

SPECIFIC TIP: Configure the Plot Interval in the FieldSense Web App

The constant exchange of location logs between the handset and the server could impact battery performance. You can have your admin reduce the frequency of this exchange by re-setting the log interval from the default setting of 1 minute to 5 minutes in the Admin panel of the FieldSense web app. Make sure that you logout and login again to the app for the changes to get refreshed.

Test your battery. 

Ensure that your battery is in good working order – all batteries have a certain number of charging cycles they’re rated for, after which the storage capacity of the cell begins to decrease – so even if its showing 100% charged, it won’t last as long as a new cell. If you have a spare battery or can borrow a friend’s battery, try using that to see if it seems to hold a charge better.