WASHINGTON — You’ve heard that you need to shut down your computer on a regular basis. So it would seem to make sense that you need to do the same for your smartphones. But one tech expert says it isn’t necessarily so.
Kyle Weins, the founder of iFixit, tells TIME that phones are a different deal, and that shutting it down at night “isn’t something that necessarily falls under routine maintenance.”
For one thing, while shutting down and restarting a computer will help clear problems, Weins says that quitting and restarting your apps will do the same job, and more easily.
And when it comes to power, even when a computer is asleep, it uses a little electricity. Even a small amount, over the course of a year (and multiplied by the many computers at a typical workplace), really adds up.
Since smartphones run on batteries, there’s no need to worry about that — you’re not really running them down when you’re asleep, anyway.
Smartphone battery life is between 300 and 500 cycles from fully dead to fully charged, Weins says, and partial charges count toward that (charging up from 50 percent would count as half a cycle). So really, battery life comes down to “how hard you use your phone,” he says — streaming music, watching videos or using GPS really takes a toll — so does heat.
You should however, run your phone down until it’s dead and then charge it all the way back up about once a year, Weins says — it helps recalibrate your counter, making the reading of how much battery you have left more accurate.
