Phone Battery Life: Is Yours Spotting?
Are you spotting?
What does that mean exactly?
It means your cell phone battery life is spotting.
There are many ways to improve your cell phone battery life, but the easiest and most effective way is to do something called “spotting”.
Spotting is a term coined in the cell phone industry that refers to the practice of charging your cell phone only when you can see a battery spot. You know, one of those little symbols that look like this:
That’s it. That is all you have to do to improve your cell phone battery life. When you see that little symbol on the screen of your cell phone, plug it into a charger and charge it up! It’s that easy!
Think about the last time you were sitting at a red light on your way to work. Did you check your Facebook feed? Did you send out a tweet? Did you play a game?
That’s what I thought.
Your cell phone has become an extension of your body – and you can’t live without it. But, have you ever experienced the awful feeling of having no battery life left? It’s like being stuck in the middle of nowhere, not knowing if you’ll make it home in time for dinner.
So, how do we increase our cell phone battery life and avoid this uncomfortable situation?
Have you ever heard of “battery spots”? They are caused by heavy use of battery consuming applications. The more apps you use, the more likely it is that your cell phone will end up with more spots than a Dalmatian. But, sometimes even when we don’t use our phones actively, we still get those spots. How does that happen?!
Well, some apps keep running in the background and waste your battery life without any obvious cause. The good news is that there is a simple solution to stop these apps from draining your phone’s power: You need to spot
I know what you’re thinking. “Cell phone battery life again? Boring!” I would agree with you, but there’s a whole new batch of people entering the smartphone world every day, and they are in need of help. Plus, as I’ll discuss later, there are some cool new technologies that can give us big improvements in cell phone battery life.
I’m going to show you how to use your cell phone to the best advantage and get the most cell phone battery life out of it. There are some trade offs though – like I mentioned, using the phone less will give you more cell phone battery life. But with a little effort, you can have a lot of fun and still get decent battery life.
If you follow these tips and tricks for your cell phone or smartphone, you can have a much better cell phone battery life experience and be happier with your new device.
So you’ve bought your new cell phone, now what? Well you may have heard these terms around: Talk time, standby time and even mAh. These are all measurements of battery life or how long your batter will last.
Talk time (hours) is just what it says, how many hours you can talk on your cell phone before it dies. Standby Time (hours) is the amount of time that the battery can survive without being charged. mAh stands for milli-amp hour and is a unit of measurement for rechargeable batteries. The higher the mAh number the longer a battery can keep charge.
You may have also noticed that the battery life on some phones is much better than others. Here are some things to know about batteries to help you choose a phone with good battery life when shopping for one:
When looking at Talk Time or Standby Time remember that they are measured under ideal conditions, in other words if you don’t use any other features on your phone expect it to last even less time than stated. If you use other functions like games, music player and web access expect it to drain your battery even faster.
There are several steps you can take to improve your cell phone batteries life.
In most cases, having a dying battery is simply a matter of annoying inconvenience. You run out of juice at the most inopportune times, like when you’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way home or just as your big date strolls into a bar.
But once in a while, having a dead phone in the wrong circumstances can be downright dangerous. Imagine yourself stranded on the side of a lonely road, just off the freeway and with no shoulder to speak of, at night, with no hope of getting service and a dead battery.
What to do? Well, there are two things you can do: one is to run back over the same ground we did last time for the forgetful folks among us; and two is to give you some more tips that will help you squeeze every last drop out of your cell phone batteries.
The latest in cutting edge technology has allowed for the development of a new cell phone battery that lasts for days! Or weeks! Or maybe, months. What? No, it isn’t going to be available for your cell phone. It’s only going to be available for the next new hottest cell phone, which will come out just as soon as they can convince you that you really do need a new one.
There is an easy way around this problem though. You can extend your current cell phone battery life by up to 30% if you will only use your cell phone like we used to use them.
How much extra talk time and standby time would you get with a 30% increase in your battery life? Well, that all depends on how much you use your cell phone and what kind of features it has. If you use it like we used to, you can expect anywhere from four to six hours more talk time or from 72 hours (3 days) up to 120 hours (5 days) of standby time between charges.
This article is based on my recent research on developing a predictive battery lifetime model for mobile devices. A related paper has been accepted for the upcoming International Conference on Energy-Aware Computing (ICEAC’12) in August 2012, so stay tuned for the next update.
The smartphone energy consumption was not an issue in the past; however, it becomes more and more important now due to the emergence of cloud computing and 3G/4G networks. As shown in Figure 1, there is a significant performance gap between the CPU and memory subsystems and I/O subsystems such as disk storage and network communication. Among them, network communication consumes the most power, which can be up to 5 times higher than that of CPU execution.
Why is it? The main reason is that network communication has to keep radio transceiver turned on until a message is sent or received. Prior work [1] shows that about 60% of total battery energy consumption by smartphones are caused by keeping radio transceiver turned on.