It’s a problem that we've all been sufferers of but that doesn't make it any less irritating. You’re on your way out the door in a terrifyingly short time but your phone or tablet could do with a little more juice battery before that door slams shut. The problem is none of our devices charge as quickly as we’d like, and battery technology shows no sign of fixing that problem any time soon.
Of course, if you find yourself in desperate need of a little more power on a truncated time-scale then there are a couple of things that you can do to try and eek a little more power out of even the shortest periods of charging. It might not fully charge that power hungry phablet you’re toting around, but it’ll give it handy bump at least.
First, a little back story.
Each smartphone we take on our travels with us – and tablets to a lesser extent – comes with a variety of sensors and radios. WiFi, cellular, 3G and LTE on top of that, GPS, NFC and all manner of other acronyms that we can’t remember off the top of our heads. There’s a lot going on inside that little package, and it all needs powering.
So, and by now this probably isn't going to come as much of a surprise, turning all those radios off can have a dramatic affect on power usage. That also means that if you turn them all off at the same time as trying to cram more power into a device’s battery, it should charge faster. In fact, it could theoretically even charge as much as 50% faster than with them off.
What this rather lengthy preamble leaves us with is an indisputable fact: turning Airplane Mode on can make your phone or tablet, be it an iPhone, iPad, Android or a Windows Phone smartphone, charge considerably faster than with it turned off, which is great news in a pinch.
And anything that makes us be tethered to a wall outlet for a shorter time is a win in our books.
