No need to switch off your smartphone at night

If you often switch off your smartphone at night to give it some rest do remember that such "rest periods" don't do any good to your cell phone. "I would say that shutting down your phone at night isn't something that necessarily falls under routine maintenance," observes iFixit founder Kyle Wiens, a technology expert.

According to Wiens, shutting your smartphone off won't necessarily help save your battery. "Batteries in phones have a finite lifespan -- the more that you use them, the faster that battery wears out," he says. In general, smartphone batteries have a life of between 300 to 500 full-charge to fully-discharged cycles.

And even if you only use a fraction of your phone's battery and then recharge it to 100 percent, that still counts towards a full cycle. "If you wear your battery down 50 percent then charge it back up, that's half a cycle," says Wiens. Powering down your smartphone at night won't help preserve the battery, since it's unlikely that you would be using the device at that time, anyhow.

"It comes to how hard you use your phone," says Wiens. For instance, if you're constantly streaming music, watching videos, or using it as a Global Positioning System (GPS) device while mounted on a car's sun-soaked dashboard (heat kills batteries too), your phone's power won't last very long.

Instead, what you can do, advises Wien, is periodically drain your battery to zero percent and let your smartphone die. "If you run your battery all the way down to zero every once in a while -- once a year is fine -- it makes the percentage count," says the tech expert.