Know Your Smartphone Battery

My Smartphone battery has been letting me down of late.I charge it overnight from 0% and when I wake up in the morning it’s still at 0%.I am frustrated but I totally blame myself for this. When am charging the phone and it’s almost between 25%-45% charged I plug it out and use the phone till the battery is down to 0%.

You don’t have to experience this, trust me it’s frustrating. So in order to conserve your smartphone battery life, you must know its kind of battery.

There are generally two kinds of rechargeable batteries commonly used for smartphones: Lithium-ion (Li-Ion), and Nickel-based batteries: namely Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) and Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd).

The battery capacity in NiCd batteries are reduced every time you recharge them. Nonetheless, NiCd batteries have longer life cycles i.e. they can be recharged more often than NiMH batteries. Nickel-based batteries should be charged (to the full amount) when they’re more or less out of power, and not when there’s still a good amount of energy left.

Li-Ion batteries have the longest life cycle among the three types of batteries but they also need to be charged more frequently (even when the battery is not fully used up) to maintain its original capacity. To keep your battery lasting longer, find out more about the type of battery that your smartphone uses and maintain the appropriate charging strategy for optimum usage.

The rule with Li-ion batteries is to keep them 50% or more most of the time. When it drops below 50% top it up a little if you can. A little a few times a day seems to be the optimum to aim for.

But don’t charge it all the way to 100%. It won’t be fatal to your battery if you do a full recharge – most of us are forced to do these every now and again in emergencies. But constantly doing a full recharge will shorten the battery’s lifespan.

So a good range to aim for when charging a Li-ion battery is from about 40% to 80% in one go. Try not to let the battery drop below 20%.