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Online multimedia content consumes our smartphone’s battery life like no other, and most of us faced the challenge of trying to send an important email or place an urgent call with less than 5% battery. But what can we do to halt or slow our battery depletion?

Here are 20 tips to help you with that...

1 – Don’t set up a personal hotspot, unless your smartphone is being charged, because it has the ability to kill your battery faster than you ever think. The more connected devices through your network, the faster your battery will vanish.

2 – Disable your cellular data, whenever there’s an available Wi-Fi network. That will not only save your battery, but your money as well.

3 – Exit your active tasks and apps in the background to minimize the usage of your RAM and save power for the rest of your road trip. You can do that on your Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4 by pressing and holding your home button, and then swiping any active app to the right or the left to kill it, or clicking on the rubbish bin/exit icon on the bottom right of the screen to kill ‘em all. And for iPhone, you can do that by clicking on the home button twice, and then exit apps one by one.

4 – Turn off the auto brightness feature, and if there’s a plenty of day light, you can decrease the screen’s brightness to the minimum level that will enable you to use your phone without losing your vision.

5 – Turn off your Bluetooth (well, who needs it nowadays anyway?)

6 – Turn off the locations services (but don’t get lost!). If location is on, it continuously uses your connection to send and receive data, even if you’re not using your device.

7 – Fetch your email manually, and turn off the Push feature, or at least make it less often, like hourly.

8 – Auto-lock sooner than later, like one minute, or press the sleep/wake button directly after using your smartphone to lock it.

9 – Turn off the equalizer (iPhone: Settings>Music>EQ).

10 – Turn on the volume limit, and set a cap for your music sound level, to save your power, as well as your ears. (iPhone: Settings>Music>Volume Limit).

11 – Disable as many notifications as possible (well, I have the minimum number of notifications by choice).

12 – Tweet and use Facebook wisely! Cut your multimedia consumption on the go, and don’t check your social media accounts every two seconds.

13 – Turn off your 3G/4G, which will cut down your battery usage. You’ll still be able to connect through the tortoise Edge network, but it’s better than nothing.

14 – Make sure to stay-updated! Always search for newer software for your OS, because updates sometimes fix battery-related bugs.

15 – Let it breathe! Charging your smartphone while in certain carrying cases may generate excess heat, which can affect battery capacity. If you notice that your smartphone gets hot when you charge it, take it out of its case before charging. For instance, iPhone works best between 0° and 35° C (32° and 95° F). Keeping your iPhone as near room temperature as possible (72° F or 22° C) is ideal, according to Apple.

16 – Use your smartphone regularly! For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down), according to Apple.

17 – You may choose to replace your battery altogether when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs. iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 400 full charge and discharge cycles, according to Apple.

18 – Buy an iPod for music/videos, instead of consuming multimedia on your smartphone (you can get one for as low as $45 for music only).

Well, you may have realized that all the previous precautions can be taken while you’re still connected, however the next three can act as your last resort to save whatever possible regardless your connection:

19 – If your battery cycle is really on the brink, you gotta kill all your Internet connections off, including the cellular data and Wi-Fi, which will convert your smartphone into a dumphone, i.e. just for your network calls.

20 – Turn on your Airplane/Flight mode, but that means you won’t be even able to place calls. You can resort to that option temporarily in low or no coverage areas, because searching for a network depletes your battery cycle, PCMag says.

We hope this helps! Do you have any other suggestions? Leave a comment and share your knowledge with the world!