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Useful tips to know to extend the life of your battery

As smartphones and tablets become more powerful, they consume more electricity and drain their batteries faster. While flip phones can survive without a charge for days, you often need to charge your smartphone every night to make sure it has enough to get you through the day.

ContentsUnplug your laptop/smartphoneWatch the heat and coldKnow when your battery is lowLots more to do

Today, most phones, tablets, and other electronic devices are powered by lithium-ion batteries, but scientists and engineers believe we're approaching the limits of what we can store in them. Until the next best battery is developed, we'll just have to make do with the batteries we have.

Here are some important tips on how to take care of your cell phone and laptop batteries to extend their life, as well as know when they're dry.

Note :
1. The tips mentioned here are the ways to maintain and care for your battery to extend its life. This is not to optimize battery usage for operating systems.

2. The term "battery" used here refers to laptop/smartphone batteries.

Useful tips to know to extend the life of your battery

If you have a Mac, you can find the information in the "Hardware" section of your System Information window. Note that Apple, like many other electronics companies, tracks battery life by cycle count. When a battery is fully charged, it is called a cycle. The vast majority of MacBooks have a cycle count of 1000, which is when the battery is considered consumed. However, 2010 or earlier MacBooks may have a cycle count of 500 or less.

For your smartphone, external apps can help a lot. The Battery app for Android or Battery Life for the iPhone or iPad can tell you how much battery life you have. Remember that you probably don't need to replace a laptop or smartphone battery until the capacity has dropped to around twenty percent, although you can do so sooner.

Much-more-to-do

There's more you can do to extend your battery life. Dim your screen display, find power-saving modes, and don't rely so much on your phone's GPS. We've already covered plenty of battery saving tips for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux, and iOS, so be sure to check them out. But above all else, you should keep your devices' batteries at around room temperature and not fully charged so that they can continue to last for the long haul.

But no matter how hard you work to keep your battery alive, they will eventually fade. So while you can make your three-year battery last longer with proper care, check its levels. The last thing you want is to realize out of the blue that your computer or smartphone battery can't hold a charge at all.

Image credit:2010.06.08