Best and worst ways to boost smartphone’s battery life

There were different types of tips for boosting your smartphone's battery life over the years and while some of them are legitimately great, some of them are also myths.

The New York Times recently ran a series of tests with the help of product recommendations website The Wirecutter to come up with a comprehensive list of the best and worst ways to really improve your phone's battery life , reports BGR, an online portal for mobile and gadget news.

As we have heard some of these dos and don'ts before, some of them were new to us.

For example, they found that people who still sync all their music to their phone and play it that way instead of through streaming services will definitely consume less power.

The reason for this is obvious since having all our music on the device means we won't have to consume power by getting it through your 4G or Wi-Fi radio.

One less obvious tip is to not shut off our Wi-Fi access in favour of cellular data if we're away from home. While it does cost more power to run both the Wi-Fi and 4G radios, it's also true that being connected to a strong Wi-Fi hotspot is more power efficient than using your cellular connection.

That said, they also recommend not always choosing Wi-Fi over cellular because having a weak Wi-Fi signal will actually consume more power than having a decent LTE signal.

Another counterintuitive tip is to enable phone's virtual assistant to be able to listen to us at all times. While we might think that this would gobble up lots of battery power, the Times and Wirecutter found that there is "a negligible difference in battery usage between having the always-on virtual assistant enabled or disabled over a two-hour period."