How To Improve OnePlus 5’s Battery Life

After the introduction of the OnePlus 5, it garnered immense popularity with potential phone buyers with a budget that capped out at Rs 40,000. In fact, not just the OnePlus 5, but every phone before that has risen the benchmark of absolutely perfect. That’s because while being in a rather affordable range considering the spec sheet and competing with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S8 or the Apple iPhone 7, the OnePlus 5 became an absolute value-for-money proposition. Since we have been droning on about the specifications, the OnePlus 5 packs a beastly 8GB RAM with 128GB internal storage, the Snapdragon 835 processor with a clock frequency of 4×2.5GHz & 4×1.9GHz.

What may not sound right, on paper, which is a 3,300mAh unit, it is actually a downgrade from the OnePlus 3T (3,400mAh). But, that isn’t a problem as the phone scales down the RAM and clocking frequency when the OnePlus 5 isn’t required to run at full pace. The software offered in the OnePlus 5 is the stock Android 7.1 Nougat with Oxygen OS. This mated to the superb RAM and processor along with the Adreno 540 GPU.

And in case, you think your phone use is more than the juice it offers, the OnePlus 5 is offered with a Dash Charger. According to OnePlus, the charger can give your another six hours of standby time in just 30 minutes.

Now, while the OnePlus 5 has a number of tricks up its sleeve to get the maximum usage time from a phone, there are some things you can do in order to reduce battery consumption.

1. Changing themes which consume less battery

Changing your OnePlus 5’s theme which has lesser colours and a rather simple background with icons that are legible, but, not flashy. Such themes consume less battery thereby offering the most standby time. The 1080p Optical AMOLED screen also saves battery as it turns off the dark coloured pixels thereby saving energy. So, all you need to do are a few modifications by changing your current theme to system-wide dark theme.

Go to Settings > Display > Theme > Enable Dark Mode.

-Match the Accent color with the dark OnePlus 5 theme.
-Use a dark wallpaper with it

2. Invert Colors

The system-wide dark theme isn’t compatible with all the apps and websites, hence, there is a color inversion option to help you in these situations. The option can be found in Settings > Accessibility > Color Inversion. This feature inverts the color from a white background to black background. You just need to toggle it and the AMOLED full-HD display will take care of the rest.

3. Ambient Display

It is a one-off feature which allows the OnePlus 5 to wake up each time you receive a notification. However, frequent new notifications will increase the screen-on time, thus draining the battery quicker. Simply go to Settings >Display > Ambient Display > Turn Off.

4. Optimising Apps

The OxygenOS boasts advanced battery optimization option which restricts background activity of the apps. It is a more aggressive version of battery optimisation apps. The drawback of this option is that you will not receive any notification from optimised apps but will surely slow down the battery draining process.

Here’s how to do it! Settings > Battery > Tap on the three dots at the top right corner > Aggressive doze with high power usage > Turn On

5. Reducing CPU Clocking Speed

The OnePlus 5 takes smartphone experience to a whole new level. In case you are using this phone only from a productivity point of view and not to run heavy duty apps, the clocking speed of the CPU can be manually scaled down. What this translates to is reduced battery consumption. Wondering how to do it? Go to Settings > Performance > Processor > Maximum CPU Frequency

These are the best ways to maximising your OnePlus 5’s battery life. There are other ways too, like keeping device’s location services off, switching data and WiFi off when not needed and similar toggles that one should keep in mind while using a phone. If you think there is some other important trick that has worked better for your OnePlus 5, do let us know about it in the comments section below.