5 Common Smartphone Battery Myths

1- Don’t use your phone while charging : Most people believe that using your smartphone while charging might cause your phone to implode or end up electrocuting you. Well this is not remotely true, except if you’re using it in a bathtub or if your charger is Aba made. Charging your phone and using it at the same time has no effect on battery quality. However, it can slow the rate at which your phone get fully juiced because the longer you screen is on the more power it’ll consume.

2- Let your battery run down completely before charging : This was applicable to old age batteries which are the Nickel Cadmium or Nickel-metal hydride batteries. These batteries used to be foolish. They tend to forget their full capacity hence can no longer charge 100% again. Most Modern smartphones however, use lithium-ion batteries which works entirely different from the old batteries. In fact, complete battery drainage before charging is believed to reduce battery durability. Most batteries have finite number of charging cycles and as it continuously increases battery efficiency is reducing. As your battery drains to 0% more charging cycles results. It is better advisable to keep your battery charged at all times in contrast to complete depletion.

3- Leaving your phone on charger overnight damages the battery : This is probably the most common. As it is believed overcharging reduces the battery’s ability to hold charge. This is true for ancient lithium-ion batteries that could overheat or even explode if charged for too long. Modern phones however, are called smartphones for a reason. They’re intelligent enough to detect or recognize when the battery is fully charged thereby limiting the power reaching the battery. In fact, most smartphones undergo trickle charge that improves battery health. Leaving your device to charge overnight is not as detrimental as they say. This however,doesn’t guarantee you leave your device connected to the power source in excess of 12 hours. Some other factors might arise such as the battery overheating and this coupled with a poor battery casing might cause your battery to explode. It is more recommended to maintain battery juice between 40% – 80%.

4- Use only original charger to charge your phone : Although the use of official original charger is highly recommended, brand-off or third party chargers work just fine. However there’s an exception to super-cheap crappy chargers which can lead to battery damage. A Licensed third party charger is just fine as long as it charges you device. Although it might take a longer time to fill up your battery.

5- Task Managers or App killers conserve phone battery : Most often, you’ll find a lot of people opting-in for task managers to help preserve smartphone battery. But in the actual sense these apps only results in more battery depletion.App killers tend to arbitrarily destroy applications running in background thereby taking it out of the phone’s RAM. Most of these apps are required for the phone to function normally. So as soon as they’re closed, they’ll have to load to the phone’s memory all over again. This frequent loading and unloading puts extra stress on the device leading to more power consumption than if you just left it alone.