8 tips to help you stop worrying so much about your phone’s battery life

It’s 3 p.m., you’re out and about, expecting an important phone call, and your battery is at 5%. It’s a terrible feeling, but with a few quick tweaks, you can make sure it never happens again.

1) Check for battery hog apps and decide whether you really need them. Navigate to Settings > Battery, and find a breakdown of what’s using your battery. See something you don’t really need using too much? Delete it.

2) Turn off unnecessary features like parallax (iOS), animated wallpaper (Android), or the vibrate feature when your phone rings. These things can be neat, but they certainly aren’t worth having to charge your phone at 3 in the afternoon.

3) Keep your phone’s software updated. Sometimes software updates decrease apps’ battery usage. Always keep your phone updated to ensure you aren’t wasting battery life without even doing anything.

4) Turn on Low Power or Power Saving Mode manually if you know you have a long day in front of you. These options limit some of your phone’s functions, but if you just need to make it through a few more texts or calls, you probably don’t need the extra little things.

5) Don’t let your screen drain battery – lower the brightness and make sure your screen shuts off relatively quickly when you aren’t using it (Settings > General > Auto-Lock on iOS, Settings > Display and Wallpaper on most Androids.

6) Turn off push notifications. If you don’t need to know immediately, turning off notifications for email or social media apps can save tons of battery life. And any time you need to know, just check manually!

7) Not using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth? Turn them off!

8) If all else fails, buy a battery case. They may add a bit of bulk, but if your phone is dead, it’s all bulk.

If you’re still having problems, bring your phone into Fix It Fast. We’re happy to make sure you’re doing everything necessary to get the most out of your phone’s battery.

We’ve all been there: you carry your phone everywhere, so it’s bound to get wet. But there’s all kinds of advice out there about what you should do if your phone takes a bath. We decided to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Here’s a step-by-step plan for what you should do to save your phone from a watery demise:

• First, dry it off as much as possible with a towel. Get any obvious moisture out of there quickly. The faster you can do this, the better. Blow, shake, vacuum, hold it next to a fan – anything you can think of to drive out moisture, do it.
• Second, stop worrying about voiding the warranty. Once you get the phone wet enough to set off the water damage indicator, you’re out of luck as far as your warranty goes.
• Third, place your phone in an absorbent material. While you’ve almost certainly heard that you should drop your phone in a bag of rice after it gets wet, rice is actually not the best option. What you’re looking for is something that soaks up liquid readily, and better options than white rice are oatmeal, instant rice, or silica gel (you know those little packets that come in shoe boxes and tell you not to eat them? Well, still don’t eat them. Just use them for your phone.). Use several cups to cover the phone entirely, and wait 24 hours.
• Fourth, check your phone by using it as you normally would. If it doesn’t act as you’d expect, it’s best to get it checked out.

There’s plenty you can try at home, but once you’ve exhausted your options, bring your soaked phone to the experts at Fix It Fast. Even if we can’t dry out your phone, we may be able to save your data, and you don’t want to lose that on top of the phone itself!