This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Penn chapter.
“Sorry, my phone died.” This short phrase is thrown around all the time — sometimes by us, sometimes to us. And while it started out as an excuse for not responding to someone, more often than not, the transient nature of battery life is now an increasing issue for us phone-reliant college students. Luckily, there are little tricks you can learn to help keep your battery alive a little longer, or sometimes, even a lot. Check out these five tips:
1. Turn off Parallax
You may have noticed that when you are at your home screen, your background will move with the tilt of your phone. While this feature is cool for some, it is often dizzying or unnecessary to others. Don’t think you need it? Turn it off through Settings>General>Accessibility>Reduce Motion>On, and save some battery.
2. Quit Your Apps
Most people know this feature, but if you are iOS7 or iOS8, you can double click the home button to display all the apps open. You can then proceed to “swipe up” any app that you don’t need. People often forget to quit their apps after they are done, so even if you stop using the app, if you don’t close it, it’ll keep running. A cool new feature of iOS8 is that you can now see what apps are using the most battery under Settings>General>Usage. This helps you know which apps to quit if you need them all or simply want to have your battery last a little longer.
3. Turn Off Location Services
Some apps like maps and weather are necessary for location services, but others really aren’t are unnecessarily and unknowingly draining your battery life when you open them. Edit these settings under Settings>Privacy>Location Services.
4. Turn Down Your Brightness
Unless you need your screen to shine like a flashlight, turn down your screen brightness. The level of brightness on your screen may seem like no big deal, but the energy your phone expends to keep everything a little bit brighter would really surprise you. You can also turn on auto-brightness if you want your phone to help when you forget.
5. Turn off What You Don’t Need
This is like quitting apps, but for settings like WiFi and Bluetooth. When these features are on, they are constantly searching for connectivity and searching drains your battery without you even knowing it.
Image courtesy of: HuffingtonPost.