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.