PSA: cellphone battery life

[Daniel]

Most of you (if any) don't rely on your phone as your only digital device.

Still, this might be useful.

I heard about this on the Internet and have tried it for two days (with some cheating; I admit):

Turn YouTube off. It's not enough to not use it because it still runs in the background. Make sure it's turned off. Make sure the icon is not in color. It needs to be grey when it's on one of your phone's operational screens.

The battery (I haven't timed it) seems to last about 1 1/2 times longer. Yes, I estimate it at 150% as long, give or take.

I highly recommend this if you need to rely on your phone as... a phone, send and receive texts, and have Internet access it you need it.

[Axtremus]

More so than most people, I like to manually "close" unused apps on my mobile devices as a matter of habit.

Still, if availability is what you want, it's easier and more effective to have multiple devices.

In a household with multiple people, this comes naturally.

For singles, a low cost way to achieve that is to simply keep the old device when you "upgrade" to a new one, and use a prepaid SIM -- severely limited data, but cheap to maintain. (Used to be that you can just swap the physical SIM card, but as newer phones stop supporting physical SIM, a second SIM is now needed for the second phone.)

[Daniel]

That's a great idea.

I forgot the numeric password to my last phone (and saved it anyway). It got bricked, in other words.

I didn't think about it again until recently, when my roommate tried to steal it, and dumped it in my laundry basket. I never had it there. It was on my closet shelf.

It kept demanding the password and when I couldn't get it right it would set a timer to try again. It always sounded an alarm.

I had to put it outside in the laundry shed to let it run out of battery (87%) and stop sounding its alarm.

That is a Moto G with an LCD and low pixel density. My eyes strained to read it. Now I have an Edge with a OLED and a higher pixel density.

It would make a good second phone when I get my Pixel 10 XL (a Pixel, not mid-tier, and a very large screen are the reasons I want it,
although I hope it doesn't have a battery drain issue, and if I could find another flagship OLED phone, I'd consider it).

I wish I liked Samsungs phones but their recent Amoled displays are overly bright to my eyes, anyway.
I tried a mid-tier model about a year ago and couldn't live with it.

Yes, I'd like to have two phones.