The following are the reasons why 4G/5G enabled smartphones use more power. Note wifi uses 1250 mJoule and cell data uses 2400 mJoule of energy.
-
Traveling is one of the main reasons why your phone battery can drain faster. In particular, when you are traveling, your phone will be required to switch to several mobile towers for you to stay connected to a particular network and receive your calls and messages. The switching of the phone network from one tower to another is known as handover.
-
Wifi is more energy efficient than cell data.
-
Further, when you are receiving text messages or making calls, your 4G/5G network pauses. Due to continuous changing phone radio frequencies, your battery ends up experiencing a strain on battery power.
-
Most wireless services providers have established their 4G/5G enabled devices in different locations to connect to networks. That means your smartphone will try hard to maintain a WiFi connection. Therefore, it will end up using more batteries to maintain a stable WiFi connection.
Although we cannot blame the 4G/5G on your mobile phone, which makes you charge your device twice a day, the issue might lie in the generic way such devices are developed and configured to use a particular network.
Battery usage will also depend on your smartphone’s operating system that is designed for better battery consumption and connectivity. Fortunately, you can get customized ROMS that help in saving battery power in Android smartphones.
How to save battery power
Turn off data fetching and push notifications
Modern technology has brought the convenience of delivering everything, including celebrity tweets, weather, news, and emails, instantly as they happen. Apart from ruining your sanity, constant data checking can deplete your battery. Therefore, you need to adjust the push notifications and date fetching intervals in the individual apps and your phone settings.
Most of the social media and news apps regularly check in the background for new information. That is why you need to change the email push notifications to save your phone’s battery life manually. Not only that, most famous apps, especially the ones which heavy audio and graphics, are known to be notorious battery guzzlers.
In particular, free versions of video games apps with ads are the main culprits. Further, you need to remember to close your apps instead of minimizing them. That is because if your apps continue to run in the background, they can drain the battery.
Adjust your screen timeout and display screen brightness
The screen on your mobile phone can drain a significant amount of battery power. Probably your smartphone might auto-adjust its brightness, but if the battery begins to drop to levels that make you more anxious, it would be advisable to adjust the brightness to a lower level to save the battery.
You can also consider the screen timeout when you want to save the battery. The timeout is when your phone screen can automatically sleep when it does not receive input from you but having a short time frame can battery help in saving the battery life.
Keep the phone cool
Heat involves one of the aspects that ruins battery life, and even it is your laptop or phone battery. Fortunately, you can easily save the battery life by removing it from your pocket or hot case, avoid leaving it to overheat in a hot car and shutting it down to cool down when overheated. Further, you can turn your phone off when you are not using it to conserve the battery.
Disable WiFi
It is best to disable the WiFi connection and use mobile data to connect your phone to an active WiFi network. If you fail to do that, your smartphone can search for open WiFi connections resulting in draining of battery power. Also, when you are traveling, your phone might be out of range in a 4G/5G or WiFi zone.
The best solution you can do is to switch your phone into an Airplane Mode until you arrive in a place with active or Stable WiFi coverage. As revealed above, the constant searching of WiFi signals consumes more battery.
Does turning Bluetooth off help to save the phone battery?
Most people are used to applications and other phone processes which use more power when they are running. Therefore, it is understandable that people assume that turning Bluetooth on can use a considerable amount of power.
In reality, leaving your Bluetooth on in the background does not resemble the idea of running an app. Instead, leaving the Bluetooth on resembles the idea of permanently connecting your phone to a WiFi network. In summation, turning your Bluetooth on but it does run cannot affect the battery life.
Surprisingly, the situation differs when you connect your devices to Bluetooth. For instance, a device such as Bluetooth headphones that need a steady and constant Bluetooth connection to stream music can drain the battery power.
Research indicates that leaving your Bluetooth on without connecting it to any device can drain approximately 1.8 percent of the battery. In contrast, if you use Bluetooth for a high-intensive activity such as streaming will consume approximately 6.6 percent of your battery.
That means by turning the Bluetooth off, and you can have an extra battery life of approximately 10 to 15 minutes per day. Therefore, if you do not use Bluetooth, you can turn it off, but if you have devices that use Bluetooth, turning it off can be inconvenient and cannot make a significant difference.
To save the battery of your device, you need to stay connected with an active WiFi network. Anytime that you find the WiFi connection unstable and has a weak signal, you will need to disable the WiFi network on your phone.
There is nothing stressful like looking at your phone and realizing that it drains the battery after a few hours. Such a case has left most people arguing whether or not turning on WiFi uses more battery than mobile data since the invention of modern smartphones.
Other people claim that leaving WiFi off and connecting your phone to a 4G or 5G wireless network is the best of saving a battery. Regardless of your claims, both 4G/5G and WiFi consume more battery power, depending on the situation.
