Are you charging your phone in the right way? — Tip #7

Can you even use your phone while charging or is it bad for the battery? 🪫

Modern phones are incredible engineering marvels, but their battery drain is ridiculous. If you are old enough, you might remember the pre-smartphone era when you could sometimes go a whole week without charging your phone!

The goat of mobile phones 🐐 → Nokia 3310/3330

Fast forward to today and I am personally charging my phone every day. If I’m out taking lots of photos and videos, I might even have to charge it twice in one day. If you guessed I own an iPhone…well, you’d be correct 🤡 (long live Android on this aspect, although the situation isn’t much better).

Having owned many phones, from the pre-smartphone era, to Android, and finally landing on iOS: I’ve tried them all. One question I’ve always asked myself is: What’s the best way to keep the battery “healthy” for as long as possible? Because generally, I’d buy a new phone whenever the battery started dying too quickly.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years:

• 🔌 Using your phone while charging doesn’t harm the battery health. The phone might heat up a bit, but as long as it stays within a normal temperature range, it’s fine. If it gets too hot (like when I was walking under the Dubai sun 🐪), your phone will warn you.

• 🤳 Picking up a phone, using it and putting it back on charge is perfectly fine. I use a convenient magnetic stand o charge my phone and smartwatch, so I often take it off to use and then put it back to charge.

• 👮 Phones automatically suspend charging to preserve battery health. Older batteries required caution when charging overnight, but today’s phones handle this by stopping the charge when the battery is full. Feel free to charge overnight without worry. For extra safety, you can change your battery settings to charge up to 85%.

• 🛜 Wireless and wired charging are equally safe for your battery. I had a gut feeling that wireless charging was worse, but that’s just a myth.

So basically, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Modern batteries and phones have solved most of the user experience issues we used to worry about.

Let me close with an anecdote before your weekly tip. You may have noticed that the battery charge lasts much longer going from 100% → 99% and from 1% → ☠️. Why is that? It’s all about user experience!

• Phone makers realized many users were frustrated seeing their phone drop immediately from 100% → 99% after a full charge, so the phone doesn’t truly reach 100%. Also, that initial 1% actually covers more than the other percentages.

• The last stretch from 1% → 🪫 is a critical moment when users might panic with lots to do before the phone dies. To help, phone makers intentionally extend the duration of that 1%, so you’re really using about 4-5% of the battery, giving you enough time to finish important tasks (like paying a bill 😛).

Your weekly tip: Charge your phone however you like. Use it while charging or not, it’s all up to you. Just avoid fully discharging the battery, as that shortens its lifespan. Once your battery drops below 20%, start thinking about charging, and definitely plug in when you’re down to 1-2%.

Make sure to forward this tip to a friend who can’t live without their phone 🫰

See you next week, until then…

Don’t Panic 😱