Exposing it to the sun or sand, storing it in your unprotected pocket or waiting for it to reach 0% percent in order to carry it sensitively affect its useful life.
It has been sold to you with a solid casing, a robust screen and an almost eternal battery life. But over time it proves not to be so solid, robust or eternal. They may have given us a jack for hare, but also that we ourselves, with the misuse we make of it, are damaging the mobile phone.
Premature deaths of mobile phones can be avoided. You just have to follow a few basic tips every day to do that. There are them for all the parts of the ‘smartphone’: the battery, the screen or the applications that we have installed.
When the sun is hot
It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and the rays of the sun are not just a torture for our skin or the environment. Also, for the mobile phone. A basic advice not to shorten the life of the devices is not to expose them to the light of the star. If we do, their components, external and internal, will heat unnecessarily and degrade. If we are also using them, the temperature increases. This is because lithium batteries degrade with heat. In the absence of a new material to improve the situation, we can do something to prevent wear and tear.
First of all, do not leave the phone for hours on the table of a terrace or next to us on the beach or in the pool. If we are going to use it, let it be as short a time as possible, with the brightness or contrast of the screen lower (something that you can also reduce in other situations to lengthen life) and without using applications that make a great waste of resources. In relation to this, if we have applications open but running in the background, we should also close them.
There are models that warn us to pamper the terminal for a while. This is the case of some iPhone, which warn their owners of overheating. But if we don’t have one of these terminals, just touching it we will realize that it has a high temperature. Faced with this, in addition to applying the advice we have already given, we must look for a cold place in which to lower the degrees, such as the airflow of a fan.
Broken screens
A boat soon, an option if we are not in bikini, swimsuit or nudist plan, would be to keep the mobile phone in the pockets. However, this also implies some precautions: if you put it in and take it out you could scratch the screen. And if you share space with some keys, we already have drama. To avoid all this, nothing like looking for a case that fits the size. It’s better if it’s a cover, the kind that opens from the side.
But if we already have the scratches and they are not very deep, we can add toothpaste to cover them. Pour a little in a damp cloth and rub carefully until we see that the break becomes smaller or disappears. Then, wipe the remains with another cloth.
The case also protects from another protagonist of the summer holidays and that many users fear since the beginning of this technology: water. Excessive sweat on your hands or sitting on a wet surface with your mobile phone in your back pocket may affect the operation of the terminal. Again, a cover that covers the entire surface will help prevent further harm.
Clean hands (using the phone)
Using the mobile in the bathroom, while we eat, freshly lifted… Different daily situations in which the fingers interact with other surfaces. And maybe we have them dirty. This can affect our health, as the terminals become contaminated with bacteria over time. But also because we put them at risk.
First, use your phone with clean hands. But then don’t take it to the beach (where grains of sand can scratch the screen) or to other places where it can get dirty, like a kitchen, or fall and lose sight of forever, like, ‘e.g.’ the toilet. There are transparent screens on the market, like a sticker, that act as a barrier between the terminal and our hands. In addition, they also help to avoid scratches and other damage. On the other hand, again the cover will help to keep it from getting dirty.
The cleaning also reaches the ports or slots. For example, the charger. You will notice that it is necessary to act when the cable is not inserted well. There is a home-made trick to making it as good as new: take a toothpick and wrap some cotton in one of its ends. Introduce it and start scratching carefully until the accumulated dirt is removed. Continue until you see it as the jets of gold.
Battery: how to charge?
One of the actions that drags more doubts, myths or questions is the charging of the battery. How do you do it? With the level in minimums, with a little more…? Can you leave the whole night charging? Do we disconnect it as soon as we reach 100%?
You also don’t have to wait until your phone is at 0% battery level to charge it. This is a myth. Small charges can be made when the phone is half, 40 or 60% of its presumed maximum capacity, but never when it is completely empty.
If it reaches one hundred percent, it must be unplugged. The reason is that the charger will continue to operate little by little to maintain that percentage; this will affect the long-term duration of the terminal, as we would be stressing it. Thus, it is not recommended that we leave the phone plugged in all night, nor should we worry if we disconnect it at 98 or 99 %.
At first we were talking about heat. Maybe when you’ve filled up the battery, you’ll notice that your phone or charger is hotter. That’s why, in connection with what we said at the beginning, charge in a shady or covered place, to prevent the Sun from raising the temperature of the whole thing even further. Also, at this time remove the cover, to prevent it from getting hotter.
Finally, a defective or bad charger will make an inefficient charge. So, if we see a stripped cable or any damage, let’s take it to a clean point or other recycling place and get a new one. Trust only the officials or the manufacturer’s recommendations if you want a long life.
Hoaxes about the life of the mobile phone
There are many who criticize the so-called ‘apps’ of optimization, because they do not really help to improve the functioning of the mobile to last longer. The key is that if we have to install a new application to clean, the system is slower and consumes more battery. Therefore, the mobile phone is used more and is more likely to die sooner.
In addition, some act very suspiciously. For example, they help reduce CPU overheating by closing applications, but to reduce the temperature it takes a little more time than it takes to close a couple of ‘apps’.
If you’re concerned about the resource consumption of ‘apps’ on your phone, you don’t need to install an application. Go to the settings or configuration section and look for Battery or Applications. In this space you can see, depending on the model, which application spends more, what is the temperature of the device … If necessary, force a stop to prevent them from running in the background or value uninstalling some that consumes many resources and barely uses.
Another myth is that of putting a mobile phone wet in rice so that it absorbs humidity. For this to be true, we should dismantle it and unfold all the internal pieces for the cereal. Also, leave it that way for more than a day. And that wouldn’t mean it would work the same way again. You don’t have to put it in the microwave to dry it or to bring it closer to any other heat source.
With these simple tricks of walking around the house we will make the mobile as solid, robust and durable as we were told when we bought it. Programmed obsolescence is another thing, but we can face it to delay the next visit to the store.
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