Extending Battery Life This Holiday Season

Many of us travel during the holidays. When we travel we take our mobile devices with us.  These devices have batteries that often simply can't keep up with our busy lives, especially during the holidays . Even if you give yourself plenty of time to make it to make it to your destination, there is not much you can do if your flight is delayed or if traffic is backed up. Not only will delays make you late, but they could also deplete the battery life of your phone and tablet. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to extend battery life and save power.

If your smartphone has a battery case available that adds extra battery life I would recommend one if you travel. Most of these cases have a connector that plugs directly into the phone’s charge port, which is how they deliver the power. These will often triple the life of your battery!

There are also external battery packs. These are usually very small and usually connect your mobile device with a USB cable. If your smartphone does not have a battery case accessory available these are your best bet. These battery cases are also great for tablets.

Saving your battery's charge can be as simple as tweaking some settings on your phone or tablet.  Here are some changes you can make to prolong battery life when traveling. Each smartphone will have slightly varied ways in which to make these changes but I trust you can figure it out!

Dim the screen: Most phones include an auto-brightness feature that automatically adjusts the screen's brightness to suit ambient lighting levels and system activity. This mode uses less power than constantly running your screen at full brightness would, but you'll get even better results by turning your screen's brightness down to the lowest setting that you can tolerate and leaving it there.

Adjust your screen timeout: When your device has been idle for a certain amount of time, the screen shuts off and goes back to black, thus reserving precious battery life for when you actually need to use it.

Turn off Wi-Fi: If you're not using Wi-Fi, turn it off. Same goes for Bluetooth.

Turn off, or limit, notifications:  These are the popup notifications from apps such as Facebook, Twitter, CNN etc.

Minimize unneeded apps and options: Speaking of apps, kill unnecessary apps that aren’t in use. Because our smartphones are excellent multitaskers, they tend to keep apps running in the background until they are forced closed. Apps are heavy energy consumers. Once again each smartphone will have different methods of doing this.

Turn on Airplane Mode: This disables all of the wireless features of your device, including cellular data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and other location services. Therefor even if you are not flying and you want to simply save as much battery power as possible turning on this feature will help.

Turn off location services:  This will save a lot of power by disabling GPS services.

Turn off vibrate: Vibrating uses much more power than playing a ringtone does. It takes a lot of power to make your smartphone wiggle!