The newest generation of tablets have really focused on extending battery life, giving you an average of about 10 hours of use for most models. Sometimes this isn’t enough though, especially when you’re traveling, and newer platforms like the Windows 8 tablets still have some battery life bugs to work out.
You can extend the life of your tablet battery life by employing a few tricks:
Keep it Cool
Tablet batteries function best at room temperature and anything dramatically colder or warmer than this can drain the battery. Don’t leave your tablet in the car, since this is a hot-spot for temperature fluctuation.
Charge Sparingly
You might be in the habit of plugging your tablet in whenever it’s not in use, but this can be a mistake. The battery wears down a little more each time you charge it, so you can increase the overall life of your battery by skipping charging cycles when you can. Let the battery run down into the red before charging it to extend its overall life. Turn off your tablet to charge it too, since charging it while it’s on creates a series of mini cycles as the battery runs down a little and then recharges while it’s plugged in.
Lower the Lights
The biggest drain of power on your tablet is the screen light. You can decrease this drain by lowering the lights in your settings. Go to settings, brightness, and then manually lower the lights.
Turn off Location Services
Unless you’re using your GPS maps, or trying to check in on Facebook, your location services use your battery power unnecessarily. Only turn on location services when you need them and remember to turn them off when you’re done.
Disable Push Notifications
Push notifications are the little numbers, checkmarks, or messages that pop up to let you know when you have new email, when it’s your turn to play a game, or any other periodic information. Searching for and delivering these messages uses battery power, so disabling push notifications will save you some power. Go into the settings of each individual app, or go to the notifications settings for your device, depending on what operating system you’re running, and turn the notifications off.
Remove Widgets
Increase battery life by removing widgets that continuously monitor weather, social media, news, etc.
Employ Airplane Mode
When your tablet is out of wireless range, it will use up battery life by continually looking for a signal. Turn on airplane mode to stop this searching. Airplane mode will turn off all wireless services, so it can save you some battery life anytime you don’t need a wireless connection on your tablet, like when you’re reading a downloaded book.
Other Tips
Other ways to increase your tablet battery life include increasing the refresh intervals for your email and social media apps. You can also enable the lock screen, and set it to automatically turn off after a short time of not being used.
There’s obviously a trade off for performance or convenience when conserving battery life. If you don’t want to compromise in these areas, an accessory battery can be purchased for your tablet that will at least double the battery life without decreasing performance.
