Charge Your Phone Faster

Podcast - Charge Your Phone Faster . . .

Such agony! You're forced to stop playing your favorite online video game and plug your phone in to recharge its battery. And face it, some phones can take hours to charge.

Are you a heavy-duty smartphone user? I think this includes just about everybody these days.

According to Patrick Kiger in an article on How Stuff Works, the average American spends 4.7 hours a day staring at and tapping that tiny screen.

However, there is good news. You can reduce your phone anxiety by following this tip.

While charging, switch your phone to airplane mode. This way, the phone won't slow down the charging process by continually burning energy, trying to connect with cell phone towers, and plot your location with its GPS function.

This trick works. So dependably, that mobile provider Verizon recommends it.

The reason why is this, while your phone is in its regular mode, it's continually trying to signal the cell tower and pinpoint your location. Your phone has assisted GPS, which calculates your location coordinates using the cellphone network rather than satellites. This function burns up a lot of power.

How you ask? Because location-finding prevents your phone from going into energy-saving sleep mode.

When you switch to airplane mode, you turn off the reception of those radio transmissions, and as a result, your phone charges more quickly.

But don't get too excited. Because it turns out you don't really save that much time. When CNET tested this concept a few years ago, airplane mode only shaved four minutes off a phone's charging time in one test run and 11 minutes in another.

Try it, what have you got to lose? Well, then again, you might just miss a phone call. Or worse, a text message. No worries, you have voicemail, right? Or is your voicemail full? Well, that's another story.

There's always something. My suggestion, get back to your game.

"Won't you be my neighbor?" If you enjoy our weekly visits, please share them with a friend.

This is Patrick Ball; as always, thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

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