How to Keep Your Smartphone’s Battery Happy and Healthy

Do you have a love/hate relationship with your smartphone? Recently, I owned an iPhone that was a couple of years old, and while it was in excellent shape otherwise, the battery charge seemed to run out hours after I charged it. Smartphone batteries can be temperamental things, but like most temperamental things in life, you just have to know how to treat them right in order to get the best results. Here’s some advice from Yahoo! Tech for keeping your smartphone’s battery happy, healthy and most importantly, juiced up:

Less is More

As a general rule, you want to make sure that your smartphone’s battery is charged above 50%. Once a month only, you should try to do a full drain of the battery, followed by a full charge. However, when it comes to typical charging, you’re most likely overdoing it.

Overnight phone-chargers take note! Technically you should not be charging your phone for extended spans of time. Though most chargers are designed to curb charging once your phone is all full, you should avoid juicing it to 100 percent and then leaving it connected to a charger. Overall, short starts and fits of juice are much better than constant zero to 100 charging. If you’re totally neurotic, the real sweet spot oscillates between 80 and 40 percent at all times.

Chill Out

Your battery does not like heat. So in order to keep it happy, you don’t want to, say, leave it on your car’s dashboard on a sunny day or bring it into heated yoga class. It turns out that phone batteries are actually happiest around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. But as Yahoo says:

Not like you should forgo a trip to Hawaii just to preserve precious battery life, but just be mindful about where you leave it.

Don’t Let it Go to Zero

Lithium-ion batteries actually can get volatile when they reach a 0% charge. So just to be safe, try not to let your battery reach zero if you can help it.

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