Secret to doubling your battery life

You know how it goes when you first get a new smartphone. Battery life is amazing for the first few days, then ...

You know how it goes when you first get a new smartphone.

Battery life is amazing for the first few days, often lasting well into the night. Then, as you download more apps and use them actively, you find yourself scrambling for a power bank or charging point by lunchtime.

We keep hearing battery life is the next frontier of smartphone technology – and then we keep seeing dramatic advances in every aspect of the handset but battery life.

In the good old battery days of a decade ago, a Nokia 6310i gave you seven days’ talk time and a month on standby. The rapid advance of smartphone technology has meant average battery life has rapidly gone down, instead of increasing, because many more components and functions have been built on the same old batteries.

Now, however, battery management functions, such as those on new Samsung, LG and Huawei devices, help to identify which apps drain the most power and shut down the offending tools.

But, strange to say, this doesn’t keep our phones going longer. As we keep opening new apps that we hope are less demanding, or keep open some of the apps that are indicated as having low power demands, the battery drainage continues at the same high rate.

This happens particularly while one is driving and using navigational apps such as Waze and Google Maps.

The assumption that tends to be made is it is not the app itself resulting in heavy battery use, but the need for the maps to be updated continuously.

This results not only in an ongoing data flood, but also requires the phone to keep polling the 3G or LTE masts at base stations along the route. Surely it’s the prime reason the battery is dying?

The truth is simpler and a lot closer to home.

The reason Waze appears to chew up battery life faster than a puppy destroying a slipper is because it keeps alive the real battery hog: the screen display.

Check that battery management tool again: it can almost be guaranteed half the battery usage in any given period is coming from the display. The bigger the screen, the more the display demand, and the faster the battery drain.

For this reason, entry - level smartphones with 3.5-inch screens tend to have far more battery life than the average 5-inch or 5.5-inch flagship devices.

Compa c t editions of the Samsung Galaxy and Sony Xperia phones last longer than their bigger siblings.

This is counter- intuitive merely because we expect to get better performance when we pay more.

The exception to the rule appears to be the giant-sized phablets: the 5.7” to 6” behemoths. But there is a simple reason for that, too. Most of these phones have oversized batteries, specifically to compensate for the giant displays.

It’s not an industry secret either.

Manufacturers continually