Lasting power

Is there anything more annoying? You’re in the middle of a D & M with your best friend, or you’re about to level up on Angry Birds, or maybe (like me) you’re about to go into labour and you don’t know your husband’s new mobile number … and your battery goes flat. Again. Agghh!

The Squeeze: If we all charged our phones half as often it would be the equivalent of taking half a million cars off the road.

 Smartphones do so much. Because we can, and do, send emails, surf the web, run apps - oh, and talk - on our smartphones, their small batteries get a workout! To reduce your battery’s workload, and therefore the amount of time you need to spend charging your phone, you could use your phone less (as if!), or you could follow some easy tips:

* Reduce the brightness of your screen

* Check your email accounts less often, and turn off push mail if you have it

* When you are not browsing the web, turn off 3G

* Turn off connections like WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS when you're not using them

* Kill apps that are running in the background

* Don’t use vibrate 

Living Lime: A Swedish group myFC has created a water-powered phone charger called a Powertrekk. It is about the size of a compact camera, it doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall and it only needs one spoonful of water (and a small metallic device) to fully charge an iPhone.

By Anna Minns

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