Belt-Clip Your Cellphone for Better Battery Life

Former Valleywag consigliere Paul Boutin offers up a handful of great, low-tech fixes to your high-tech gadget issues. One of them involves getting your cellphone away from your warm pocket to boost its battery life.

Photo by hsiqueira.

If you're planning to be away from your charger for a stretch, Boutin finds evidence that keeping your phone on a belt clip, away from your 98.6 body oven, or in a hotel fridge overnight, can actually get you a bit more juice.

"Cellphone batteries do indeed last a bit longer if kept cool," says Isidor Buchanan, editor of the Battery University Web site. The 98.6-degree body heat of a human, transmitted through a cloth pocket to a cellphone inside, is enough to speed up chemical processes inside the phone's battery. That makes it run down faster. To keep the phone cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt.

Most of the other low-tech work-arounds for gadget issues in the New York Times article have been covered here before, including:

Amplifying your keyless entry/car key fob with your head
Drying out soaked gadgets with rice
Boost your wireless signal with homemade wifi extender
Boutin recommends straight-up liquor or Listerine for CD cleaning; we've previously recommended bananas, toothpaste, and Pledge for similar results.
Saving your crashed hard drive in the freezer.

One (relatively) new and notable technique the article suggests for getting more ink out of wasteful cartridges is using a hair dryer:

"The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge," says Alex Cox, a software engineer in Seattle. "When the cartridge is almost dead, those nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to flow will let more ink out of the nozzles." The hair dryer trick can squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge after the printer declares it is empty.

So even if some (okay, most) of this advice seems familiar, the article makes for a great forward or print-out for family and friends always hitting you up for a little gadget triage. Got a favorite low-tech save for seemingly Ph. D problems? Share it in the comments.

Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems [New York Times]