Smart phones, all the Androids, iPhones and Blackberries, for all the amazing press they get, haven’t been around for long enough for most people to have much experience with them. If you just only just treated yourself to one of these recently, you’re probably knocking yourself out playing with all the apps you could get your hands on. And as you go about your iPhone business, you’re probably noticing how a smartphone battery doesn’t last nearly as long as a normal cell phone battery (normal, as opposed to smart, not as opposed to abnormal).

With a regular cell phone, you don’t need to plug it in more than twice a week if that. The smart phone on the other hand, if you make use of its features and its screen a lot, wouldn’t mind it if you let it suck off the power outlet maybe once every 12 hrs. Some of the most power intensive use you could put your iPhone to is surfing the net. While trains, planes and coffee shops everywhere do what they can to be generous with the power outlets for you to feed your habit with, there is a better way to stay out of low battery danger – prevention.

It’s all about understanding how to work the features on your phone to make the battery last longer. To start with, phones that run on the CDMA technology, the kind used by Verizon, typically are more power-inefficient than the GSM standard – what you see on an AT&T. That means, your iPhone is more likely to be power efficient at finding and holding onto a signal, than is a Verizon-powered Blackberry or Android. If you possibly can, it would be a good idea to choose a phone on the network that gives you the most chance of battery longevity.

But once you have your phone, it’s entirely up to you how you tweak your phone’s features to make the most of it. The back-light on your phone’s LCD, is a real power hog. If your phone is able to detect ambient light and automatically turn the brightness up or down, this can be a really useful feature. A genuine Blackberry holster for instance, is designed to let the Blackberry know when it is inserted, so it can turn off the display right away.

How about all those great wireless features that let you connect to a Bluetooth headset, or use WiFi for better e-mail and browsing performance? These are great to use when you actually need them. But if you’re leaving them turned on when you are not exactly using them, you are draining your battery by having the phone frantically search for the best signal all the time. Putting your on-board wireless devices to sleep when you aren’t using them is a great cell phone battery saver.

Anything that automatically keeps looking for updates, like your wireless devices, is a bad feature for battery life. Your smart phones can always keep checking your e-mail every now and then for any new additions to your inbox. Of course having it search for new e-mail 10 times when only one of those ten times might yield anything, is a waste of your battery. You could then set it to allow you to just check your mail manually and save a great deal of your juice.

It always helps to have an app that can keep an eye on the battery for you, and then turn off unneeded functions as often as possible. Radio Saver has a Blackberry app that will shut down your the cellular antenna on your phone, to save on cell phone battery life. But it will only do this when it detects that there is no signal. If there is nothing at all, why should your phone waste its battery frantically looking for a signal that isn’t?

Manufacturers will often tell you that keeping your phone on the power outlet all the time, will lower its life unnecessarily. This means, that if you plan to leave your phone unused for several months, those months are better spent unplugged. If you want to know how many charge-and-discharge cycles your particular battery will last you, why don’t you try the website BatteryUniversity? They have some great statistics that should be right up your alley.

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