OnePlus is working on a new OxygenOS feature called Optimized Charging that will attempt to extend the life of your phone’s battery by taking your sleep schedule into account. When you put your OnePlus phone to charge before going to bed, it will refill its power cell to 80 percent of its maximum capacity and then temporarily stop. A hundred minutes before you usually wake up, your first alarm or event of the day, the phone will then charge to full. The idea here is that by preventing the battery from staying at full capacity for too long, OnePlus can slow how quickly it degrades over time.
If you have access to a OnePlus 7 or OnePlus 7 Pro and the company’s Open Beta software, you check out the feature by pulling down the notification shade on your phone, tapping the cog icon to launch the Settings app and then tapping on the “Battery” heading. You’ll then see a toggle to turn on Optimized Charging. If you need to turn off the feature temporarily, there’s a notification that allows you to do so. OnePlus will likely roll out the feature to more devices — as well as the stable branch of OxygenOS — sometime in the near future.
We’ve seen a couple of companies take a similar approach to battery degradation. For instance, if you have iOS 13 installed on your iPhone, it’s automatically set to take your charging routine into account.
Moving forward, OnePlus says it plans to enhance Optimized Charging so that it will be able to detect when your sleep schedule changes due to a time zone change or a late night out on the weekend. If you’re worried about OnePlus getting access to your sleep data, the company says your schedule is stored only on your phone.
Author: Igor Bonifacic
Source: Engadget
