Your Favourite Smartphone Activities that are Costing you Battery Juice, Part 1: The Practical’s

Manufacturers have figured out how to let us do just about anything on our smartphones these days, but the one thing they haven’t figured out yet is how to make our battery last long enough for us to do things we love like text, browse the Internet, send snaps, stalk our crushes, play games, shoot videos and more. Few of us can get our phone through the day without a charge up at some point.

Until manufacturers extend our battery life, here’s a list of all the things you love doing on your phone that are draining it of power.

Screen brightness
Though it’s important to see what you’re doing (or watching), you might not be aware of the fact that keeping your screen’s brightness all the way up is killing your battery. No matter how big your screen is, your phone is not your tv and to help conserve power, dim the screen a bit (or use the auto=dimmer feature that most phones have now). Also avoid using the screen as a flashlight. Your phone has an app for that.

Location services
The modern human is losing all sense of direction with our access to GPS these days. It’s almost a routine for people to check into places like restaurants, concert venues, and more on social media, and GPS helps us get there. But if you’ve got it on all of the time, you might not have enough battery power left to help you finish the trip.

Enabling Bluetooth
This one’s pretty simple. Bluetooth accessories are cool gadgets and whether you’re syncing a wireless headset or a portable speaker, hooking up a device via Bluetooth is easy and quick. But if you’re not using it, disable Bluetooth. It’s not the worst when it comes to draining your power, but it’s not helping either.

Netflix
Netflix offers HD video quality over WiFi, and this handy video-streaming service gives us the ability to veg out in front of a screen anywhere we are but what it doesn’t do, however, is replenish the power in your battery.

Music Streaming
Who doesn’t love services like Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, and more for all your tunes. Unfortunately, one of the most popular of these services, Spotify, also happens to be one of the biggest battery killers.