Maintaining Your Smartphone

Tristan's Smartphone reporting for duty

After I went home from work yesterday, I did a few errands, and then eventually went home.  Like most nights, I sent some text messages to my friends to see if anybody wanted to grab a bite to eat or come over to watch some Netflix.  While I was texting, I noticed that my keyboard was slowing down significantly.  I figured one of two things was happening:

1) I text too fast for my phone
2) I have not been maintaining my phone properly so it is slowing down.

Since I do not text at blazing speeds, I'm going with the latter of the two.  This prompted me to go on a late night internet quest to find out some useful resources for maintaining your smartphone's performance.

Here are some of the most logical and best tips I have found so far:

1) Keep your phone charged properly. Generally you want to wait until your battery is pretty low before you charge it all the way back to full.

Not even the 6th tip will help this 'lil fella

2) Keep your phone cool.  You can actually lose a pretty significant amount of performance if your phone gets too hot.  Keep in mind that a lot of the more durable cases can contribute to an increase in your phones temperature

3) Be an application minimalist.  If you are the type of person that downloads every app under the sun, you might find that your performance suffers.  If you have a ton of apps, make sure that the apps you are not using are turned off.  A great way to make sure peripheral applications are turned off is by using an app (go figure) called "Advanced Task Killer"  it's free and easy to use.

4) Reset your phone daily.  I called the local Verizon store in Winchester to see if the representatives there had a few performance saving tips, and this is the primary answer I received.  The representative made it clear that your phone should stay off for about five minutes until the phone can recent its connection to the local towers.

5)  Clear your smartphone's cookies.  These are little programs that assist marketing companies keep track of your browsing patterns so that they can collect some data from your browsing patterns.  All smartphones will have a way to clear out cookies.

How to clear cookies from an Iphone
How to clear cookies from a Samsung Galaxy s3

6) Reset your phone to factory default settings.  This is your last resort.  When your phone is too clogged up and a complete wipe would save you more time and spare you from massive headaches, this is always the last option on the table. This will delete all downloaded apps, and restore your phone to its day one settings.

How to factory reset an Iphone
How to factory reset a Samsung Galaxy

I cannot stress this enough. If you factory reset, you are going to lose everything that is currently on your phone.


This post was not designed to shed too much light on battery saving, but I went ahead and found a really great tech blog about saving battery life.  With these easy steps, you should be able to keep your constant battery charging to a minimum.