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Hey there, listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. So how many of you are still charging your phone and you’ll let it charge to 100%? Turns out you’re not supposed to be doing that. You’re actually supposed to charge it a little bit at a time. My colleague, Jennifer Jolly writes about this in a column that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. And she provides five key tips for taking care of your phone properly. A lot of things change. And so what once may have worked a few years ago, doesn’t work right now. So at the very top of this list is don’t burn out your battery. And one of the ways that you burn out your battery is by letting it charge all the way to the very top, 100%. Now before, our older phones, this was the case. Plugged them in, made sure they were charged to 100%. But with these new batteries that are out now, actually, if you want to maintain the health of the battery, you should be charging them up to around 80%-ish or so.
So it’s okay to pop them in for a little bit and let them charge. You get to about 80%, 90% for the best usage. And then when it gets to around 20%, 30%, even 40%, pop it on for a little bit and just keep that battery there. And what that does is it keeps the battery healthy and it’s not as stressed out. It turns out a lot of our new phones with these lithium batteries, the most stress you could put on them is when you’re charging them fully or discharging them fully. The other thing with that is these batteries only have a certain number of times that you can charge them. And the more you fully charge them, the more you degrade the battery, which means your battery life is going to go a lot shorter in the long term. So if you’re charging to 100%, stop right now. One of the other tips that Jennifer mentions, and this is a really good one, is don’t forget to cancel those free trials.
They pop up on your phone. They’re so easy. You just pop in. You do the free trial for a year or for a month or whatever, and then you forget about it. And the next thing you know, you’re getting a bill. “Why am I getting this bill from Apple or from Google or whatever?” And it’s because you let the free trial lapse and they charged you for it. So it’s always good to go on your phone and check that stuff out. On iOS, you just go to settings. You click on your Apple ID. And then you go to subscriptions, and it’ll show you everything. And then you can decide what you want to renew or not renew. On Android, you have to go to Google, and then manage your Google account. You’ll see a section for payments and subscriptions, and then you can go manage them. And you do the same thing.
Again, easy to forget. Especially some of those ones that are several months to a year, you forget about them. And then in a year from now, you get a bill. Double check those, make sure there’s not something coming up and just prepare yourself. So that way, you’re not getting charged for something you don’t want. You can read more of Jennifer’s tips in her story on tech.usatoday.com. Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter, @BrettMolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
