Smart Phone Tablet Success: Buck Up Your Battery! Tips for extending battery life by day & by device

All right, hi everybody, uh, Randy Dean here, the Email Sanity Expert, and boy do I think I have a fun video for you today. Um, how many of you have one of these and the battery isn't working quite as well as you hoped it would? Seems to be running down pretty fast and, um, sometimes putting you in a situation where when you need it you're worried it might not make it. Oh boy, did I go down the rabbit hole on this one. By the way, hey, uh, one of the things I share— what is a smartphone with a dead battery? That's right, it's a paperweight or possibly a personal protection device. Yeah, basically worthless when they don't have battery charge. So, uh, let's go into this. Now what's funny about this, uh, session, I really thought this was going to be just a quick little video. Uh, I thought it would be, you know, turn off your Wi-Fi and hotspot, uh, turn down your screen brightness. And then I said, you know, maybe I'll do a little bit of research though to see if there's a few other ideas. Oh boy, did I kick the can on this one. But you're going to benefit. I'm going to save you a ton of time and hopefully greatly extend how long your battery is going to be able to work on these things. So let's dive in and talk about some of the stuff I found when I was doing this, this little project here. Now, this is what I thought, this slide. Is what I thought was going to be basically the little 2-minute video. Um, and these are the big battery killers. And here's the questions I want to ask you. Uh, whenever you're in a situation, if you want to preserve your battery, you ask yourself the Big Five: are you using Wi-Fi? Are you using Bluetooth? Are you using hotspot? Are you using location? And are you using data services from your carrier? And, and here's sort of the thing that you you have to think about is you wanna always check, because if you're not using any of those, they shouldn't be on. You know, like for example, Bluetooth. Bluetooth will kill your battery fast. I use it primarily in the car or if I'm streaming to our home stereo system. If I'm not doing either of those things, I don't need it to be on. So, you know, that's one of the things. Now, like, some of you might have the little headphones, the EarPods. That's when they should be on, but the second you're done using them, turn off that Bluetooth. The other one that I've found myself just making the stupid mistake is I'll turn on my hotspot when I'm out traveling around so I can use it for my laptop, and then I forget to turn it off, and all of a sudden my battery goes, "Ooh." The other one is if you're just sitting at home, why do you have your GPS on? Related to that, if you're sitting at home and you've got good Wi-Fi signal, do you need to be having your data services from your carrier turned on? Now, one of the things that was interesting about doing this video is, um, you know, I did a little test because I was like, well, if I don't have my data services on from my carrier, can I still receive phone calls? So guess what I did? I turned off my data services and I called my phone from a different phone. And it rang. Yes, for most people, you can have data services off and yet still receive incoming calls from your carrier. Just test it, see if that works. The other thing I want to talk about with data services, it, uh, is— well, let's talk about Wi-Fi and data services a little bit. If your Wi-Fi signal is low and you're trying and you have Wi-Fi on your phone is going to run the battery down really fast because it's trying to use the Wi-Fi without enough signal. So if you're in a space where the Wi-Fi signal is weak but you've got really good phone data services and a reasonable amount of data in your plan, turn off your Wi-Fi, use the network at that time. Vice versa, let's say you're in a place where your data services are weak. Here's a good example. I go out hiking a lot. Um, sometimes I'll get out into places where there's not much signal at all. Or same thing, you're out in your car driving and you're in a place without much good signal. That might be a time to turn off your data services, because if you don't really need that service, having that turned off will preserve your battery. And here's where it might really help you. Let's say you were out on a hike, you've got weak signal and you turn off your data services to extend your battery life, and then something bad happens, like you slip and twist an ankle or break your leg, gosh forbid, by preserving the battery, then when you turn back on data services as you're lying there in pain with your broken ankle, you might still have enough battery to be able to complete a call and get a hold of people. So, um, some things to think about now related to this, um, you know, so, so these are the big ones, and if you manage these the best, I think this is going to give you the best result for extending your battery life. But there's one more that you might not think of too much. It's your phone screen, and it's real simple. Do you have the thing on full brightness all the time? Do you need it to be on full brightness all the time? One of the things that I've become really aggressive with is looking at the brightness and asking myself a question: Do I really need it to be this bright? Can I turn the brightness down? And, you know, right under settings, usually it's on the first screen. You can even just, you know, on my phone, I just swing down from the top and all of a sudden it brings up, you know, sort of the base phone settings. And right at the top is home brightness and I can adjust it. Now, what's interesting is a lot of the newer devices have something in their settings called adaptive brightness, and what it does is the phone sort of looks at the setting and asks, "How bright should I be for this setting?" And it will adjust itself. And so what it'll do is it'll take you down from full brightness to something a little bit lower if you're in a setting where it doesn't need that much brightness, and that's going to save that's going to save you some battery. The other thing is, is I strongly recommend you look at your, uh, phone sleep and timeout settings. And basically these are the settings that are in there that, um, tell your phone when it should go to sleep if you haven't been using it or touching it for a little bit. And one of the things that I would recommend is maybe just dial down one level on your phone. So if you've got a timeout that's at 5 minutes, time it, change it to 3 minutes. If you've got a timeout of 3 minutes, change it to 1 minute. See how that does, because every time that you turn that down, as long as it doesn't become too big of a nuisance, um, what you could do then is, uh, basically extend your battery life just because the phone screen isn't staying on quite as long. Now the other thing that you can do, notice I'm plugged in, um, in a situation where you're plugged in You know, one of the things that you could think about is, well, maybe I can adjust my timeout settings a little bit because I'm plugged in right now, extend it a little bit longer to keep the phone on a bit more because I am plugged in. One of the other things too, I want to go back a slide because one of the things that I wanted to share with you here is this. Let's say you're using Bluetooth in your car, like I do all the time, or you're using location services in your car. Both of those situations, you know, that's a perfect situation to be plugged in. Plug into your car charger. Make sure you've got a car charger in your car. Leave the charging port in your car all the time. And plug in if you're aggressively and actively using Bluetooth and location services. You're going to, of course, probably be using your data services. If you've got all of those on, that's a perfect time to be plugged in because you're going to be draining while you're bringing it in, and you'll be able to utilize these services services while you're driving. Okay, so by the way, what's sort of funny about this, I got so deep into this, I took notes for my own session so I didn't forget to say the stuff that we want to say here. So, you know, now let's go back to the screen settings. One other thing that I didn't even think about, but these have become pretty popular, they're called sort of like dynamic or moving wallpapers or backgrounds. In essence, they're things that are sort of moving, they got little motion, maybe it's one of your little video moments where you're walking with a friend or something like that, or you got a little GIF of one of your favorite TV shows and that's what's on in the background. You know, that's basically a mini movie that is constantly running on your screen. Those kill your battery. Um, if you want to extend battery life, I just recommend avoiding the dynamic wallpapers in the background. Just have something static, something that just sits there. You know, make it a pretty picture or something, but not something with motion and movement because that uses it too. And this is one I didn't even think of. You know how the phones sometimes have, um, daytime and nighttime settings, and when it goes to nighttime settings it turns to a dark screen? Here's the interesting thing: you can set that to be your permanent theme for your phone as a dark screen. So it'd be something like this where it's mostly black with a little bit of white text on the screen. If you set that as permanent, that is a lot less power to maintain your screen. And so I just switched it to a permanent darker theme. And honestly, I think several of these— turning down the brightness, um, depending on the setting, having adaptive brightness turned on, and the darker theme— they're actually easier on your eyes too. You're not looking at this super bright light in your face all the time, all that blue light just zapping your eyes. I, I, one time I was looking at a phone in a pretty dark room with the brightness turned way up, and for the first time in my life, I got what's called an ocular migraine. Oh my gosh, that's not fun, because there was so much contrast with the brightness of the device in the dark room that it actually made my brain hurt. My eyes hurt, my brain hurt, and my vision started to go sideways in one of my eyes. Try to make it a little easier on yourself with this stuff, and you're going to extend your battery life while you're doing it too. So let's keep talking. What else could we talk about here? It, you know, of course your apps matter, uh, and when I say they matter, the way I want you to think about this— apps, it's a shorthand for applications, which is in short a software program. That's what they are, they're programs. Now I want you to think back to your normal computing days working on a computer. What would happen to your computer if you had too many programs running? Yeah, it doesn't run as good, and you— the fan would turn on because it's getting hot because it's using so much energy to manage all this stuff that, that's taxing the central processing unit. Went way back there. What I just said applies to all of this. This has got a CPU. This will run harder if it's got too many things going on. And not only that, it might run hotter too. We'll talk about that in a bit. Here's one of the things I want you to do. Always watch how many things do you got running And, um, the first thing I'd recommend you do is consider an app edit. Now, when I say an app edit, here's what I mean. Over time, we tend to collect apps because people tell us that they're good apps, and I tend to give out recommendations of apps. And you probably have some that I've recommended that are on your device that you never look at. If you're never looking at it, delete it. Get rid of the app. Just— I mean, that's going to help you in several ways. One, it's going to save space on your phone because, uh, you know, memory is sort of a priceless commodity on these devices. But a lot of these apps have at least some low-level amount of work in the background running all the time. Um, they're notorious for that. And so the less apps you have on your device, the less it's going to be taxing the device, even if you don't have the app open in a lot of circumstances. So less is better. What you want to have on the device are apps that you actually use. Now, another option I want you to consider, and I actually got this idea from one of my sessions at a conference. I was speaking at a conference and I said, you know, get rid of the apps you don't use. Um, guy in the room goes, I can go even one better, Randy. What if it's just an information-based app, uh, like a news app like CNN or CNBC or the Weather Channel or maybe ESPN? All of those have apps, but here's the thing. If you're not really using a lot of the stuff that's in the app, you could go out on your browser, check to see if they have a pretty solid mobile website that gives you what you need. If they have a solid mobile website that gives you what you need, bookmark it in your browser. Don't even download the app because one, it can't run if— it can't run on your system if it's not installed. But you still have access to the information using the browser, which means you can have several less apps. It's a good idea. And here's the other thing, uh, right next to it you'll see notifications on this slide. One of the things that's interesting is a lot of those apps that I just mentioned have push notifications. They're always, you know, basically blinging you all the time, bing bing bing, all the time. Here's the thing about that, that uses energy too, especially if you also have vibrate on, which we'll talk about right here. Uh, if you have vibrate turned on, every time this vibrates, that uses battery. Turn off the vibration in your sound settings. I know it's weird— vibration, why is that in sounds? It's not— well, it is in the sound setting from most phones. Go and turn off the vibration. That will extend battery life too. Turn off unnecessary notifications. One of the things I talk about in terms of reducing distraction on your devices is for the next couple days, just watch every single notification you receive on your device. And every time you get a notification, ask yourself, is this a beneficial notification, something I really want or need to see right now, or is this a distraction notification where the app is trying to get my eyes to look at the device when I don't really need to? All of the apps that are giving you what I call distraction notifications Go into Settings, Apps, Notifications, turn off the notifications for those apps. I will tell you that my life improved dramatically the day that I turned off notifications for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. That day my life got better because they were constantly binging me. And here's the thing, that uses battery too. So if you can manage your apps and manage your notifications better, that will allow you to extend battery life and, and probably reduce distraction dramatically too. The other thing I recommend you do, let's say you've been using your phone for a couple, 3 hours here and there doing this and that and the other thing. Do you have a bunch of apps that you've been using but now you're not using that are open in the background? Open up your app manager For me, it's just a swipe from the bottom. There's a little push button on my Android device that'll open up and show me everything that's running. Swipe to turn them off. I think, you know, you can double-click the, um, you know, uh, main button on the iPhones to do the same thing, and it'll show you everything that's running and kill the things you're not actively using right now. That will turn off what's running in the background once again and extend your battery life. Now If you're in a situation where you want to extend battery life and you don't have access to power for a while, I want to give you 3 bewares right now. Beware number 1, tracking apps. Fitness apps. You have a fitness app on here that's like tracking your mileage or tracking your steps? That is constantly using location-based data to track that stuff, and that runs battery. The other one is, are you— do you have your GPS turned on or using location-based apps like Yelp or, you know, things like that, that are sort of watching where you're at to see what's near you. If you're not really using— needing that information right now, turn off the tracking or turn off your location services for those apps. The other one that you got to watch out for are auto upload and download, especially if you're in a situation where you don't have access to power service recharge the thing. And some of the big ones— email, maybe text messaging, although I sort of think text messaging is part of the reason you got this, so that you can have access to text when you're away from where you're at. But email specifically, do you really need to be notified every time you're getting an email on a Saturday when you're out with your kids, you know, at the park? I hope not. Turn off your email notifications in that situation. The other one is, is the auto download. Um, like my device will automatically back up pictures and will automatically back up video. What you might want to do is, um, you know, as you're taking them, if you know you're not going to have access to power for a while, you might want to go in and turn off that setting until you get back to a situation where you can then back up those photos or videos just to extend battery life. Because especially if you're in poor service that's gonna tax the battery even more because it's trying to take these big files off your device and save them to your cloud storage in a situation where you got low data service in the first place. The other one is, is your voice assistant, Siri, OK Google, you know, both of those, they're always listening, which means they're using battery, plus they're always listening, that's a little creepy. If you know you're not using them right now, maybe you turn off those too. So all of those can actually, uh, affect your battery, um, quite a bit. Now what's interesting is, you see what I mean about the rabbit hole here? Like, I was going through looking at— I never thought of that. These are several of these I never thought of. And so I— now you're seeing all of this stuff that I discovered. I'm going to share some additional resources with you when we get near the end of this. That might be really helpful. But one thing that I want you to never forget with these— you can turn it all the way off. Now, when you turn it all the way off, one, it might kill any background processing, it might clear the cache, it might make it run better. Okay, like if my phone starts getting a little clunky, one of the first things I do is do a full shutdown, or maybe a full shutdown and restart. Because it just seems to regain its speed, regain its processing capability. But that might also be the signal to you that there's things running in the background or things that are locking up, and that's probably taxing your battery service too. But like the example of being out in on the trail hiking, that might be the perfect situation to just power this thing all the way down, enjoy your settings so you're not distracted. Now, counterpoint, maybe you're using it to take some pictures of everything pretty on your hike. But if you're not using that and you're trying to get this time away from the devices in the first place, power it all the way down. That way you've got saved battery in your pocket in case you really need it when you need to power it back up. And honestly, you know, if the bear is going to attack you anyway, you probably aren't going to really have time to get your phone turned on anyway. So, um, now, uh, let's keep talking about this. Hope that doesn't happen. I've had 3 bear encounters now. 3. 3. Because I'm out in the woods all the time. Uh, the other thing I want you to do is check your battery settings. Have you even checked them? You know, most of these phones you can actually go into settings and go in and specifically look at what it's got set up for battery. And a couple of things that you want to take a look at are battery saver and adaptive battery. Now what battery saver is, is that it's a tool that basically sort of tells your phone at what point when it's getting charged down do you want your phone to start being a little more conservative with its energy usage. And I was looking at this a little bit. What it does is it'll actually reduce data transfers and maybe turn off or slow down or disable high battery usage apps that are in the background once your battery hits a certain point. So I took a look, my device had it at 42%, which I thought, nah, it seems pretty good. I get under 50%, I might want to try to have my battery preserve some of the battery. The other tool that's in there is this thing called Adaptive Battery, and what it does is it's really actively looking at the whole suite of tools and it adjusts the usage to extend your battery life. I would look into both of those on your device and sort of see what you've got going on in there. You might be able to pretty much extend it right there. Um, one of the other things that related to this, uh, that I read is that you want to do system updates pretty quickly, app updates pretty quickly, uh, but maybe not right away. Give it a day or two. Most of the time, app updates and system updates, uh, when you're plugged in— remember, you're doing it when you're not plugged in, that's going to run your battery down— but app updates and system updates often fix a problem with the operating system or the app that's causing it to use too much battery usage. That's part of what they're always trying to do. Um, but sometimes when it's a brand new system update, it actually has the reverse effect and will run the battery down even faster. That's why they always say maybe wait a day or two to let the install happen in case they discover that that's what's going on. Now, oh my, let's talk about this. Do you charge it all the way to full? Do you run it all the way to empty? What's the science on this? I ended up reading several articles about this last night because I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I've heard stories about it. Let me tell you what the average layman should understand, or laywoman. Um, probably doesn't matter that much. That's the short of it. I mean, you know, at some point you got to say usability. I mean, if you're constantly like tweaking all this stuff, does it at some point just get in the way of being able to use it and use it well? And so what I read are a few things. Um, you know, if you charge it all the way up to the top, good. Like, I just noticed this is at 100%. I unplugged it because I read it. The one thing that I read is that, um, once it gets up to 100%, unplug. You don't want to leave it plugged in when it's at 100% because what happens every time it drops 99, it recharges, recharges, recharges. That's hard on a battery. Um, The other thing they said that you want to do is the very first time you get a new device, charge it all the way to max and then run it all the way to zero. Now this is interesting. What it does is it— the phone learns what the battery range is from that, and then it will adjust how it works according to that first time full up charge, first time full drain. And then from that point forward, if you really care, try to keep your phone in an operating area between, say, I don't know, I've read different, 25 to 40% on the bottom, 80 to 90% on the top. And so what you're doing is you're basically through the day, up, I'm down to 25%, better plug in for a little while, get it back up to 75, 80%. Unplug. That is the using criteria that will probably extend your battery life and make your battery hold charge better longer. Or you just plug in, keep it plugged in when you want, unplug when you want, because Do you really want to be watching your battery that much? I think it makes good sense that when you're aware of it, do it. I guess sort of my attitude is, you know, if I'm aware of it, I see it, I happen to notice, like I just noticed I was all the way charged, unplug, okay. But, you know, one thing you might not want to do though is charge it all night every night. I know a lot of people, what they do is right when they go to bed, they plug it in. Maybe a little modification of that. Here's a different idea to try, especially if you know your phone isn't going going to completely drain while you're asleep at night and use it for your alarm, charge it before you go to bed, unplug it when you know it's at 100% somewhere near bedtime, and then plug it back in when you wake up in the morning. Worth a try. Now, if your phone's a little bit older and you are using the alarm, disregard what I just said because that thing might drain and then you'll miss your alarm. Um, you know, so that, that's the kind of thing. Now, there is Certain something though that you'll probably will know intuitively really does hurt battery over time. Um, let me make sure I got everything I wanted to talk about here. Yeah, I did. Okay, good. Here's the thing: hot phones don't like to be hot. Now I want you to think about your computer. Remember your old computing? I mentioned how if too many things are running, it'll get hot and then the fan turns on. You know how the fan will turn on? Something to think about. These don't have fans. That's one thing that they got rid of. These can still get too hot. Now there's a few things that you got to watch out for. Um, one is what I call a hot charger. Now what I mean by this is you plug in that charger and either the charger gets hot, or even worse, the charger and the phone both get hot from that charger. That right there, one, that might literally be a fire risk. There might be something wrong with that charger if it's getting too hot when it's plugged in. But the second thing that you got to think about is that heat is not good for the device. It's probably time to get a new charger. The other thing that you got to really worry about is, you know, you're out in the hot sun, sitting by the pool deck, you're— in your hot car on a hot sunny day, you got your phone sitting on the passenger seat in the full heat of the sun. Hot body, no jokes. I mean, you're outside, you're working in the yard, it's a 90-degree summer day, you're sweating like crazy, your phone is right up next to your body with all that body heat being generated. All of those bad, bad. They will get the phone too hot. If the phone gets too hot, the battery life is going to be dropped dramatically, not just at right now but in the long run too. The thing I want you to think about here is maybe find some shade. Um, when, like, when I'm out in the summer out on the deck in the sun or out working in the sun, I try to always put my phone somewhere shady. I try to find some shade. Let's give it a little break from this heat. Because, you know, especially one thing too is look at this, this one only has a black phone case. Black colors tend to suck in the sunlight, they heat up even more. So, you know, if you've got a situation like that, you know, one, maybe consider, uh, you know, a phone case that's lighter in color. That might actually help a little bit. The other thing that you want to do is keep it in the shade. Um, they run best when they're cooler. They'll run better and faster and the battery will last longer. However, one other thing that I read, and I didn't know this either, they really don't like severe cold either. Now what's interesting, I want you to think about this. Think about your car. When do most car batteries die? When it gets really cold out in the winter, especially if you park your car outside, not in a garage. You'll go out and You ever had that happen? Let me tell you what you probably didn't realize. I actually talked to a person at the car service center when I had my battery. It happened, you know, and I get the car in to get a battery replacement. He goes, you know, batteries die in the winter, but what killed them was the previous summer. Think about your phone. The heat from the previous summer kills the battery. Then when you get to the winter, the battery, which is not good anymore, hits the severe cold, and that's, that's the final killer. That's what, that's what takes it out. It can't hold the charge anymore. The heat did the damage, the cold kills it. Pretty good analogy. If you can use that same strategy with this, one of the things I'll say is, you know, Don't just try to never leave your phone in a really hot car. I would say also try to never leave your phone in a super frigid car, all of you people living in Minnesota, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Maine, Canada. I have a lot of people from Canada that watch these videos too. Yeah, um, and if you're gonna be outside with your phone, actually I'd say you know, keep the phone close to you in those circumstances so it's getting some body heat. Um, you know, uh, so manage the temperature. Uh, it likes to be cool. It doesn't like to be frigid. It doesn't like to be too hot. Sort of sounds like my wife. Okay, um, let's keep going. Uh, how about this? Since we're talking about charge— chargers. Chargers, chargers everywhere, chargers near and far. Let's use our hands and feet to count how many kinds there are. One of the funny things that happens when I do my live sessions at conventions, conferences, company trainings, I'll get into this little segment right here and I'll say, so, you know, one of the things that people always tell me to say, oh, Randy Dean, I wanted to download the app you just told me, but I forgot my charger. Your charger? You got one charger for everything we've just talked about? You got one charger? Chargers everywhere. By the way, I have to tell you, um, I really hope I get a whole lot of views on my YouTube channel on this, or I sell several versions of my Smartphone Success program on my e-learning academy. Because this is the point where this video got expensive for me. Because now here's the thing, you got your traditional wall charger, and actually I got it right here, it's plugged in, let me grab it. So you got your traditional wall charger, single port. This is a high-speed wall charger. So this one is designed for the phone to charge it a little more quickly. Now you gotta be a little careful with those because just using a high-speed charger might affect longer-term battery, stability. So just keep that in mind. Still very handy to have. Now, of course, you could also get a multi-port, a two. See, by having that, you've got spouses and kids, then you're not getting screamed at because you're using the only port on the charger when they need charge too. You just gotta make sure you got a cable. I might need a new one. Okay, now hold on, wait a minute. You want to have maybe more than one. Um, how about this idea? Every key room— kitchen, bedroom, living room, office, home office— chargers for your car, each and every car. Where'd I put it? It should be here. I had a car charger port here with a multi-port too. By the way, you can have car chargers that have multi-ports. That's like a really good saving your sanity on your device. Although I will tell you, a lot of the newer cars now have USB ports that actually do a pretty good job of higher-speed charging. The older cars, they were using this as an input tool so that you could, you know, stream music and stuff from your phone, but it didn't— wasn't terribly good at the charge. That's a lot better on a lot of cars now. But hey, if you're going to get a car charger, get a car charger with multi-port so more than one person can charge at a time. And keep an extra one in your travel bag or your laptop bag. I know we're in coronavirus right now as I'm filming this. A lot of people aren't traveling like they used to, but we're going to be traveling again soon. Vaccines went out. We're going to start getting— everybody's going to start getting vaccinated. We're going to get back to living again. Yay! When you do that, make sure you got a car charger and at least one wall charger in your bag, travel laptop bag. Wait a second now, look at this. This is where things got expensive. So I started researching what are the different kinds of hookups. Look at these jobs. You can actually replace— I said kitchen, bedroom, living room, office, bathroom— you could replace your wall outlets in the places where you're frequently charging with these new kind of wall outlets. Now check this out, not only does it have standard plug-ins, it's also got 2 USB ports in a standard wall plug. You could replace the normal wall plugs that you had and turn your house into sort of the techie place where you can keep your charge. So as I'm looking at this, I'm like, "Huh, yeah, I've seen those in hotels. Why didn't I think about installing some of these in my house?" And then I thought about the lobby of the hotel where they have the desks with the big charging stations, as well as a lot of, like, you know, libraries and places like that. They— the desks with the charge ports. Airports, they have the countertop where everybody can sit down and charge up, and there's multi-ports. You can buy those for your house. You can even buy waterproof ones you can put outside. So like, I just built a new, um, stone paver patio this summer. I noticed the one problem: I don't have power service. This is where it got expensive. I go online, I'm like, ooh, I could buy that and that, and now I can have power service over at my new stone patio and have additional power service if I run a second one over to the normal area where I normally work on my deck. And wait a second, I could use this one on our kitchen island because right now it's only got a double plug on the one side, but I could get a flat plug extender which will give me a multi-plug for 4 to 6 devices with USBs on the far other side of the kitchen island. Be careful when you go out and research this stuff, and be extra careful with places like Amazon because you're going to be like, oh my gosh, look at my shopping cart. Um, and, uh, you know, I will even tell you, um, there's even now surge protectors. Uh, most surge protectors now, when you buy just a standard surge protector, have a couple USB ports in the surge protector. And let me show you what else I even got. Okay, this is a little crazy. Um, let me see if I can get this thing for you to see. This right here is an APC power unit. Now this thing cost $100. What it is, by the way, notice it's got a US— couple USB ports on the front. It's got a bazillion plug-in ports on the back. Now I plug this thing in to the main power terminal. I bought it for my home office. Now here's what I bought it for. Two reasons. This thing is a surge protector. It protects my computer when it's plugged in. Actually, I have a couple computers in here plus the monitor. Lightning storm or power surge, boom, that's gonna stop the damage or at least greatly reduce the potential damage. But as an— as a backup power unit, it also is a backup battery. It holds charge. So let's say we have a massive power outage, lightning storm, tree falls on, you know, whatever, lines are down. That will give me several hours of running time for my computer and maybe my sump pump. I can actually— if the power's out, I could just take this and go plug in my sump pump to it, and I'm pretty sure it could cycle the water while I'm waiting for the power to come back on if there's like a flood. Okay, now you're gonna have to check capacity and the power, um, capabilities, and you're gonna have to test it. It's like having a backup generator, basically a battery backup generator, but it's not a generator, it's a battery. It's a huge battery. Here's the thing, that is a phone charger. It's got the USB port on it. I just have to have the cable I can plug in. Now, no, if there was a massive power outage and I wanted to be super conservative because they said it was going to be a couple days, let's say I wanted to be super conservative, I could just use that just for my phone. And I bet you I'd get a couple, 3 days worth of service out of it minimum. Oh boy, but wait, there's more. Did I tell you this is a rabbit hole? This is a rabbit hole. Charge sticks. I borrowed this one from my daughter. These are charge sticks. Now you can get even more elaborate ones. She did something really pretty with the tape on there. Isn't that nice? But you might want to keep one or two of these in your travel bag. Always handy. And you got to remember to charge them up because otherwise they're a paperweight. They now have what are called Charge Cases, and basically they fit on your device. It's like fits right on the back of your device and plugs in, you know, as part of the case. It's an extra case that goes on the case, which will double or even triple the battery life of your device. That would be the first thing I would look into if I had a slightly older phone that's battery isn't working quite as well. I'd probably go see if it's— if I can buy a charge case to just add to the device to reboost the battery capabilities. Now, the other thing I want you to think about is if you happen to be one of those people that works outside in your job part of the day to a big part of your day, or you're big into outdoor stuff— hike— hiking, camping, backpacking, fishing, um, you're always out at the kids' sporting events, tournaments, baseball, basketball, whatever it is, places where It's just you're not going to have power, but you're outside and that giant solar furnace is burning in the sky. You can get solar chargers. A lot of them are only like $30. Some of them are pretty fancy. Like one I saw, it's a solar charger that at night when you bring it into your tent, turns into your tent light. It's like got a full light on it, but it's also got USB ports that allow you to charge up your device. Now, I would have to tell you, that seems like a perfect solution for people that are out in places where power might be a little bit hard to find and/or you want to make sure that you've got access to service. Seems like a really good investment for people that do a lot of outdoorsy type stuff. They also have obviously ones that are fully waterproof. Too, so that you could have those like lake or boat or pool or beach, ocean, you know, things like that. I don't know if they're sandproof though, so be careful with the sand. And, um, you know, here's a final thought. I used this one when I was traveling a lot before the pandemic. Um, a lot of people don't think of this. You know that your laptop can actually be a really effective phone charger? A lot of the laptops now, they can sense when something's plugged in and they know that if it's a phone, they— the laptop can use its battery to recharge the phone. And there's been a lot of times where I'm like on a longer flight and for whatever reason I happen to be on a seat on the plane where I don't have access to a plug or maybe the train. Sometimes when I'm out east, I use the train service a little bit to get around. Um, sometimes the plugs either they don't work or you can't reach it because of where you're sitting, or you're in a seat where there isn't a charge port. If you're not really using your laptop too much, your laptop's full of battery, you just plug in your phone to your laptop, boot up your laptop, plug in your phone, your laptop can charge your phone. Do that for the half hour before you land, and then boom, you've got a phone that's got some charge when you get out. But wait, there's still more. I told you this was a rabbit hole. Boy Scout motto: you want to be the most popular kid in class? Always be prepared. Let me show you a couple things to think about. Now I already showed this, this right here, this right here. You just have one of these. You walk up to somebody who's at the airport, they got the plug, they've got their phone plugged in. You can say, hey, uh, mind if I just switch this and plug you in here so I can plug in here? That's easy. How about this? This will work even if you're a computer user. This cost me like $3. Here's the plug, and here is plug 1, plug 2, plug 3. Just walk up and say, hey, um, do you mind if I, uh, do this so that we can both power up? Oh wait, if you're gonna do that, you might also, depending on their device, carry one of these. It's a 3-to-2, so you only got a double plug. You plug in and then you can plug in the 3 with the little ground line. That'll work. You will— so you carry both of these in your bag. Oh wait, and you really want to be the popular kid at the airport or coffee shop, why not consider just getting a simple little extension cord with multi-plugs? Always be prepared. See, if you've got all this stuff and you've got it standard in your travel bag you're not going to run out of battery and you're going to make other people happy. Like, you ever see that person who's like wandering at the airport looking for a wall plug and there's no plugs because everybody, even people are sitting on the floor plugged in because the flight's delayed or whatever? You see that person walking by, they're like, their phone's dying, they can't find a plug. You go, hey, I got you, man, come on over. Let's have a charge party. Won't that be fun when we can do that again? We don't have to worry that they might have death cooties. Uh, you know, it's coming soon. We're gonna come back to this. Uh, the last little tip I want you to do is really get to know your phone warranty, because I will tell you this, you know, all these tips will extend your battery life, but if you got a phone and like you're 2 months in and the battery is not holding charge that might mean there's something going on with the battery, the actual battery. I mean, it might not be a good battery. I mean, it's— they're usually pretty good now. They've got the science on these down pretty well, but that doesn't mean you might just not be that lucky and end up with one that's got a sort of a bad charge thing. And so, um, one of the things that you might want to do is really get to know your phone warranty, know your extended warranty, Know your insurance options, you know, because I get the insurance because I tend to do stupid things like leave it on the hood of my car and drive away. I've done that twice now. Um, and so, uh, I've never jumped into the water with the phone in my pocket. That's 3 times now. I need phone insurance. Um, and what you want to do is take a look and see what the insurance covers and whether one of the things it covers is, you know, a battery going bad quickly. And know your warranty. You know, a lot of phones have like a full 6-month or 1-year warranty, and if anything goes wrong, you contact them and they're going to replace it or have you send it in and get it fixed or something. The other thing that I want you to think about is this. I know that there is a lot of these like little local fix-your-phone type stores. You know, they'll, you know, Phone Master and things like that. There's all these little stores stores where they can fix a broken screen. One of the things that they can fix on some of the devices, they can fix the battery. So if you got a phone that you love, it's getting a little bit older, a little long in the tooth, but you just don't want to go through the hassle of having to set up another new phone, see, maybe see if they can do something with that battery, or look up those battery cases like I talked about, the ChargeCases. Did I not tell you that this was a rabbit hole. I mean, whoa, that wasn't— I wasn't meaning to do that. Hi, Zoomer. Be glad I was the one who went down this because with all of this information now, you should be able to really make this thing run better and longer. You know, it really should be something that you can manage a lot better just using some of these tips. Now, I will tell you, this video, if you happen to be watching this on YouTube, This video is part of my full program on Smartphone Success and Terrific Tablets, and, um, that program right now has several videos. One is a master video which sort of talks about the whole concept of using these for productivity, how you set them up, the apps that you want to have installed, uh, depending on whether you're using Office 365 or Google Suite or both. Plus additional apps and services that can extend the capabilities, as well as how to reduce some of the inherent distraction from the devices. I talked about that a little bit in this video. Um, I will— that, that's part of that full-length program. You— I'll leave the link below, uh, about where you can get more information about this program. Um, and the other thing that I will tell you is I did find several useful articles when I went down this rabbit hole on ways to extend battery life. Now, some of them, I will tell you, in the title, they say, you know, extend battery life for iPhone, extend battery life for Android, but I'll tell you what, I thought those articles were really useful regardless of the kind of device that you have. I would say check them all out if you really want to master this, because you'll see that several of the ideas that were shared in here came from those articles, so sort of look at that as my reference sheet. And I'm going to post those in the comments below this YouTube video. And if you're watching this on my eLearning Academy, I'm going to make a text file that's connected to this video which will have that list of these articles. The one other thing that I want to share with you here is you might have some ideas that I didn't mention, and I'd sort of like to make this a community board Um, this is a starting point, not an ending point. If you have other tips that can extend, uh, battery life and usage, um, both in terms of short-term when you're using on a day-to-day basis as well as the length of the ownership of the device, please write them in the comments. I might incorporate those in future programs. If you are doing this on my e-learning channel and you have a comment or idea or even a question Send me a note at Randy@randaldean.com and tell me what it is you're doing that I need to include in future versions of this program. One thing that's been cool about the smartphone program since I created it several years ago is I bet you 30-40% of the content that I built into this program has come from people in my audience saying, hey, did you know about this? Because did you know that there's more than like 2 million apps on the App Store? And so what I've done is I've laser-focused in on the ones that will give you the most benefit in terms of productivity and performance. But I can't possibly know 2 million apps. I could spend every minute of every day looking up apps and I would never be able to keep up. Um, but if you know really cool ones, you can help me stay smarter and become part of this community learning process. So please send me that information. All right, I think it's time for me to finish this thing up. I'd like to say thank you for your time. There I am up on stage, but here I am on your screen. If you'd like to learn more about me and my programs, go check out my website randaldean.com, um, and, uh, you can actually click on the programs tab to see all the different programs that I lead and do, uh, for your upcoming conferences, events, workshops. Um, you can also, uh, go to the e-learning tab to quickly go to my e-learning academy, uh, but remember I'm gonna put the link to that down below. If you liked this video, please, as they always say, like it, subscribe to the channel, turn on the notifications— unless the notifications bug you like crazy, then you don't have to. And, um, the other thing, uh, that I'd like to share is that I have a whole bunch of little PDF tip sheets and documents. One is my YouTube cheat sheet to all the videos that are on my channel that I think are going to be very useful. And yes, this video is going to become part of that new cheat sheet. Uh, if you'd like to get those little PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone, tablet usage, send me an email randy@randaldean.com, same email as the last slide, and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I will be more than happy to send you my bonus tip sheets that will allow you to take this as far as you would like it. So I hope you enjoyed this dive down the rabbit hole. Uh, Alice and the Mad Hatter were both definitely down here, and I wasn't expecting this when I dove into it. But now maybe you can master your phone battery usage, extend that phone battery life. Uh, by the way, pretty much all these tips, of course, will work for your tablet too, and a lot of these tips might actually work for your laptop. Extend the battery life on all of them. So take a look. Good luck. Happy phoning.