I finally enabled my Galaxy phone's battery protection, should have done so the week I bought it

Since buying my Galaxy Z Flip 7 last year, I've plugged it in to charge before bed and woken up to a fully charged phone. The battery is at 100% every morning, ready for me to take on the day without worrying about running out of juice.

It felt right, that's the way it should be, right? The convenience of stepping out of the house with a fully charged phone made me forget that having the device sit at 100% charge for six hours overnight was aging the phone's lithium-ion battery faster than it needed to.

Samsung has offered a feature for a couple of years now to prevent exactly this. Before Battery protection introduced more precise controls with One UI 7.0, Samsung let you select preset limits to stop charging. Enabling the feature is simple enough. Just search for Battery Protection in the Settings app. It's one toggle that you have to tap on.

When enabled, Battery Protection lets you adjust the maximum charging level from 80%, 85%, 90%, and 95%. There's also an Adaptive protection feature which stops charging at 80% while you're asleep and finishes charging the device to 100% just before you wake up.

This is a particularly useful feature as it simply stops charging early and holds it there, reducing the stress that high charge states put on battery cells over time.

It's easy to forget about the many features Samsung ships with One UI, and it's not like you get reminded of them often. Battery Protection is not enabled by default, so unless you enable it manually, you may continue to put stress on the battery that reduces its lifespan.

You'll feel the practical difference of having this feature enabled if you're someone who changes their phone after every two or three years. This will ensure that you don't need to spend out of pocket on a battery replacement a few years down the road.