Does Switching Off the Smartphone Affect Its Health?
When I was choosing the letter for this week’s Tech 911 issue, I was reminded how happy I am to have solar panels in my house. This means that I can leave most of my devices on during the day, charging from them, and not feel guilty about how much electricity I would be wasting.
What about the devices themselves? Should I leave them like that? I’m not the only one thinking about it, as Lifehacker reader Wiliam wrote with a similar question:
“My question is … Is it really less stress for the internal electronics in your tablet or smartphone to always leave it on? A former NASA Certified Electrical Engineer once told me that in general electronics is best left on 24/7.
The reason I bring this up is because for the past 2 years I have had Samsung phones and tablets that refused to fully power up after night outages and they all had to be written off due to CPU or memory card failures …
As it was explained to me, the process of turning off and then turning on this electronics every day creates an additional serious load on the internal electronics if performed for extended periods of time … for example, 3+ years, as it was in my case. “
This is definitely interesting. For starters, I assume that most – and by most, I mean 99 percent of all people – leave their handheld devices on at all times. What good is a smartphone that needs to be turned on and off all the time? What if someone needs to contact you in the early morning hours for some reason? Or what if you, like many people, use your smartphone as an alarm clock?
Generally speaking, I think it is okay to leave your smartphones and tablets on all the time because they are designed to be used that way. As for the other part of your question, I don’t think that turning your smartphone or tablet on and off will affect it – at least not more than usual, invisible wear and tear (or accidental surprise kiss on the floor) could otherwise cause problems with device.
These devices don’t actually have moving parts, so the only stress they can experience is when the components expand or contract due to temperature shifts. Play a graphically intense game on your device (or leave it out in the sun) and then turn it off or put it in a cooler place and that might do something to its internals. Perhaps the solder joint could loosen, but I expected this to be a rarer scenario.
After all, the temperature of these devices is designed for small fluctuations. I don’t see you doing them much more damage by forcing less temperature shift when you turn off the device (or turn it back on).
However, I did not touch the elephant in the room: the battery. Of all the components on your smartphone, I would argue, this is the one most susceptible to stress of any kind. For example, if you are not going to use the device for several weeks, let the battery drain a little and turn it off. Also, stop draining your entire battery before recharging it again as you are doing yourself a disservice by holding on to this old myth.
This is not entirely relevant to your question “Should I keep my device off all the time?”, But I would probably focus more on it – making sure I do everything in my power to keep the battery running smoothly – than worry about whether you turn your device on and off too much.
In fact, most of the research I stumbled upon when looking for answers to this question is your original question about turning your device on and off, that is, everything has to do with battery life , not the health of other smartphone components.
If anything, turning off your smartphone might be a good step for your health , but I haven’t really seen any other dire warnings that make me feel like turning your devices on and off would destroy them. This does not mean that it is impossible, and I am not belittling what happened to you and your devices. It is also possible that something unrelated to turning off the devices caused the problem – correlation does not imply causation, and so on.
Why not use Do Not Disturb mode on your device instead? Only one person speaks, but I rarely turn off my (many) devices and I haven’t experienced any problems yet if I left them (or slept) all the time. Join me on the wild side.