Taking care of your Windows Phone Battery

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Batteries has always been the bottleneck of smart phones, specially the ones with huge touch screens. Today, I’m going to give you some tips to enhance your battery life of your Windows phone, increase it’s lifetime and make it last longer

Batteries overview:

All batteries share some specific characteristics, all of them state on the battery itself the Voltage (measured in Volts) and Capacity (measured in mAh or mille-Amperes-Hour). These values actually indicate the most important specifications about the battery. When you buy a new phone, the battery you get is the standard one, it has the optimum voltage (V) and a good capacity (mAh). Let’s drive a bit more into the meaning of these names.

Voltage (according to wikipedia)

The voltage between two points is a short name for the electrical force that would drive an electric current between those points

The mAh (also from wikipedia)

An ampere-hour or amp-hour (symbol Ah , A·h, A h) is a unit of electric charge, with sub-units milliampere-hour (mAh) and milliampere second (mAs).

Uh, What does that mean?

In simple words, what really interest us about the battery specs is the the electric charge it holds. for example, the HTC HD2 has a battery of a capacity of 1230mAh. so if the HD2 consumes 1230mA (or 1.23 Amperes) the battery will go from full charge to 0% in one hour! or if it consumes 615mA it will last for 2 hours.

The new generation of batteries:

All batteries have cells which stores the electricity inside it. Each cell voltage can vary between 2 values determined by the manufacturer of the battery and the specification of the device. Inside the battery, there is also a circuit that controls the charging/discharging of the battery. when the battery is fully charged, the circuit prevent the cells (so the whole battery) from overcharging, same things applies for discharging so if the battery is out of electricity (almost 0%) it isolates the cells so they won’t deep discharge so your device simply goes off!

The circuit is very important in the battery, if the cells are overcharged they might explode or leak, same applies for the deep discharging, when the voltage drops below the predetermined voltage, the circuit will prevent the cells from charging again (having an irrecoverable battery/Dead battery), this is due to the fact that if a battery is deep discharged, charging it again might make it explode!

so simply the circuit prevents the battery from reaching it’s critical limits allowing it to have a longer life.

Inside the circuit, there is a number specified by the manufacturer of the battery, this number is referred to as the number of charge/discharge cycles. The cycle is the operation of discharging the battery until it is flat (almost 0%) and then charging it again until it is full.

Due to the fact that each cell can be charged/discharged certain amount of time (due to physical limitations), the circuit prevents the cell from going beyond that level. So each battery can be discharged fully certain numbers then the circuit will block it! (for your own safety, again).

The circuit also have some sort of memory, it stores it’s full capacity, empty capacity and original MFG capacity. These values are used to find out what is the current status of the battery (how much battery you have left, 20% for example). The values of full capacity and empty capacity change as you use the battery.

Now as we know a bit more about the battery, how can i improve it’s performance and life?

Calibrating your battery

Have you ever faced a strange behavior when the battery showed 70% left and suddenly drops to 40% for example? Batteries wear out as you use them, so the stored max and min capacities might be in accurate.

Every once and a while, we need to let the battery know it’s limit. Meaning it should know the minimum charge it can hold and the maximum charge it can have. this is called calibration of the battery. To calibrate the battery, all you have to do is to keep it in the device until it’s off by it self, then charging it until it is completely full (even if the indicator shows 100%, keep it on the charger for more time, it is preferred to charge it while the phone is off). The calibration actually resets the minimum and maximum capacity values of the battery allowing you to get more accurate battery indication.

How often should i calibrate my battery?

There are no specific times to calibrate your battery, you can do it at will, i prefer to do it once a week but it is up to you. usually, the batteries have a 500 or 1000 charge cycles so calibrating it 100 times a year gives you 10 years of calibration time! of course the battery will not live that long (the max i got is 4 years on my SonyEricsson P910).

Should i recharge whenever possible or fully discharge first?

To maintain a good battery health, i would recommend charging when you can until the battery reaches 100%. This prevents the cycles from being wasted and at the same time preserve a good battery condition. This operation is a matter of balance, plugging in your phone all the time is not recommended as you need to go through all the cells of the battery and drain them from time to time, keeping your battery always fully charged is a bad thing to do, also keeping it at a low level all the time is a bad thing to do. So it’s a matter of balance.

New battery, What to do?

If specified by the owner’s manual/user manual, follow the instructions. Mostly, when the battery is manufactured, the factory charge it to somewhere between 60% and 40%, this is the optimum storage capacity. So when you get a new battery, charge it fully (preferably put it on the charger overnight). This will calibrate the max level of the battery, then the next day drain it until it’s empty, charge it fully and you are good to go.

All this talk was about the battery general health, if your battery is behaving in a strange way and giving in accurate results, make sure you calibrate it. sometimes you need multiple calibration cycles for the battery to regulate.

Making your battery last longer.

The most power consuming parts of the phone are the Radio (which is the network connectivity, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), the Screen (the backlight of the screen consumes a lot of the battery) and the processor.

The processor:

Our windows phones are known of having multi-tasking capabilities, mostly when you close the application (by clicking the X button) the application remains in the background! And when they are in the background, they still use the processor, RAM and device resources which results in wasting your precious battery charge. So, when you are done of an application, close it using the exit function in the software or use a task manager (which is available in all Windows phones in different places depending on your device, consult the user manual). Closing the applications that are no longer required helps preserving the battery which results in longer lasting battery.

3G/2G networks:

When you get a Windows phone, by default it uses the 3G network. 3G is good and provides fast internet connectivity (up to 7.2mbps on the HD2) but it also consumes a lot of battery. When you don’t need a 3G connection, set your phone to use 2G, it is more battery friendly. Even if you are in a place where that have no 3G network, disable 3G connectivity as your phone always tries to find a 3G network if it is enabled, which wastes battery life! make sure you only enable it when needed.

Wifi and Bluetooth

Also WiFi and Bluetooth waste battery life, if you don’t need them just turn them off. Wifi Always scans for available access points around when it is not connected while Bluetooth keeps responding to scans from other devices so it keeps the radio active even if not used.

At the end, depending on your usage and network conditions, the battery life might vary. The average for smartphones is one day only.

How long does your battery last? let us know below.