How to get the Most out of your Cell Phone Battery

If you treated yourself to a smartphone just recently, you're probably knocking yourself out playing with every app you can get your hands on . But you will also notice how a smartphone battery doesn't last nearly as long as a normal cell phone battery . While a regular cell phone normally doesn´t need to be recharged more than twice a week, a smart phone, if you use all of its features and its screen a lot, may needs to be recharged once every 12 hours. One of the most power intensive uses for your iPhone is surfing the Internet. While trains, planes and cafes everywhere do what they can to provide you with the power outlets to feed your habit with, there is a better way to stay out of low battery trouble - an extended life cell phone battery via prevention so to speak.

It's all about knowing the features on your phone, to make the battery last longer. First of all, phones that run on the CDMA technology typically are more power-inefficient than the ones using the GSM standard. That means your smartphone will more likely be power efficient at finding and holding onto a signal, if it uses the cdma technology. So buying a CDMA phone gives you the best chance at battery longevity. And once you have it, it's entirely up to you how you tweak its features. The backlight on your phone's LCD display for instance, is a real power hog. A phone that is able to detect ambient light and automatically alter the brightness will spare your battery. A genuine Blackberry holster for example, is designed to let the Blackberry know when it is inserted, so it can switch off the display immediately.

What about the wireless features that enable you to connect to a bluetooth headset, or do you use wifi for better email and browsing performance? These work great when you actually use them. But if you leave them turned on when you don´t need them, you´re draining your battery because the phone searches frantically for the best signal all the time. So turning off the wireless features when you aren´t using them, is a great cell phone battery saver.

Anything that automatically keeps looking for updates drains your battery. Your smartphones can always keep checking your email every now and then, but searching for new emails ten times, when only one of those ten times might yield anything, is a waste of your battery. Or you could set it to just check your mail manually and save a great deal of your battery power.

It helps to have an app that keeps an eye on the battery and turns off unused functions as much as possible. Radio Saver is a Blackberry app that will shut down your cellular antenna on your smartphone, to spare your cell phone battery. It will do this when it detects that there is no signal. Why should your phone waste its battery looking for a signal that isn't? Manufacturers often tell you that keeping your phone on the power outlet permanently will lower its battery life. So if you plan to leave your phone unused for a longer period of time its probably better to disconnect it. To find out how many charge-and-discharge cycles your particular battery will last you might take a look at the website BatteryUniversity.com? They have some great statistics and other info.