If you’re a recent convert to smartphones, you’re probably still discovering all the amazing things that your new BlackBerry, Android phone or iPhone can do. But one thing you most likely found out right away: the more you do, the shorter your phone’s battery lasts.

While a standard cellphone’s charge can easily go three days or more, many smartphone owners are dismayed to learn that their new mobile toy requires charging every 24 hours, or even more often. It was great that I could use one device — my iPhone — to check my calendar and respond to multiple incoming calls during January’s Consumer Electronics Show, but I paid the price when its battery died at 2 p.m.

The answer was not to desperately search for an electrical outlet to recharge the phone (though I’ve done that) or to consider giving up the phone (done that, too), but rather to figure out a strategy to reduce energy consumption while still having it available for essential tasks. Whether you’re using a laptop or a smartphone, the devices can be tweaked to get the most out of its lithium-ion batteries.

Reconsider Your Network

All things being equal, the C.D.M.A. mobile standard used by Verizon uses more power than a G.S.M. network, principally used by AT&T and T-Mobile. If battery life is critical, you might want to consider G.S.M. as long as its coverage meets your needs.

Dim It

The brighter your screen, the more juice you’re using. If you’re in a dimly lit room, turn down your LCD screen’s brightness. If your device has an autodimming feature that detects the light in a room, use it. Similarly, if you use your smartphone or laptop to play music, lower the volume.

If you have a BlackBerry, the company’s holster will automatically turn off the screen when you insert the phone.

Chrysler and Fiat will produce a battery-powered Fiat 500EV in 2012, the first electric vehicle to be marketed under the two companies’ alliance.

The powertrain will feature a lithium ion battery connected with an electric-vehicle control unit to manage flow of power to the engine. Every part of the vehicles, except the powertrain, will be assembled in Toluca, Mexico, where Chrysler is launching gasoline-engine versions of the Fiat 500 later this year. The battery is developed by A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass. Location of the powertrain production has not been determined.

Scott Kunselman, Chrysler senior vice president of engineering, said the project is an example of the benefits the Chrysler-Fiat alliance is already generating.

Separately, Chrysler reiterated plans to produce a test fleet of 140 plug-in electric versions of its Dodge Ram pickup truck with help from a $48-million U.S. Department of Energy grant announced last year.

Those battery-powered trucks will mate a 12 kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery supplied by Electrovaya with Chrysler’s 5.7-liter Hemi V8 engine with a two-mode hybrid transmission.

The Ram EV will be able to travel up to 20 miles on the battery alone. Compared with a convention gasoline-powered Ram, the Ram EV is expected to get 65% better fuel economy over the averaging driving cycle.

As with all plug-in hybrid vehicles, consumer acceptance will depend on the development of an adequate and easy-to-use network of recharging stations. Chrysler would not say what it has done to expedite that network, but it has formed partnerships for that purpose that it will discuss in the future.

Most battery meters in electronics work by monitoring electrical inflows and outflows—in other words, how long you charge and how long you use your device. They also try to guess how your battery may have become degraded over time. But each time the computer makes such a guess, it adds errors into the calculation. These errors build up over time, and eventually you notice your laptop dying even though the battery meter says you’ve got 40 minutes left.

To solve this, you should occasionally “calibrate” your charge meter by depleting your battery completely, then charging it up fully. This usually resets your machine’s “flag” for your battery’s capacity. Of course, running it down and then charging it up again puts more stress on your battery, accelerating its death. But there’s no getting around that.

Nissan said it expects most customers will lease rather than buy battery packs for the vehicles.

Leases will account for the “vast majority” of batteries for models such as Nissan’s Leaf, Jonathan Dixon, the company’s business-development manager for zero-emission strategic planning, said Friday in London. He didn’t give a specific figure.

“With leasing there’s less risk for the customer,” said Dixon, who was attending the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit. Nissan, Japan’s third-largest automaker, plans to deliver the first electric Leaf hatchbacks late this year.

Carmakers including Nissan, General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are preparing electric cars in response to higher oil prices, government rules on auto emissions and concerns that such emissions contribute to climate change.

But Nissan’s North American unit decided against battery-pack leases for the Leaf in the United States. “The battery and car will be transacted together,” said Katherine Zachary, a spokeswoman for Nissan North America. “If customers lease the car, they’ll have only one monthly payment, and if they buy it, they’ll only have one payment. We do expect more people to lease than buy.”

Leaf production starts this year in Japan. The automaker is also preparing to build the small car in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nissan promises that the lithium-ion battery model will be able to go 100 miles on a full charge.

The best way to store batteries that you won’t be using for a long time—as in a camera, though this also applies to laptop batteries—is to charge them to the 40 percent level first, Bachmann says. Batteries “self deplete”—meaning they lose power even if they’re not in use. Charging the battery a little bit before you put it away ensures that it doesn’t get down to dangerously low levels while in storage.

The memory effect: Will your battery lose capacity if you don’t let it go down to zero every once in a while? Not likely. The memory effect applies only to nickel-cadmium batteries, whereas most modern electronics use lithium-ion or the more advanced lithium-ion polymer. Not only are lithium batteries immune to the memory effect, they also don’t require you to do anything special the first time you use them (like charge them up for 24 hours, as some gadget manuals say). Nicad batteries are still found in cordless phones, electric toothbrushes, and other cheap gadgets, but they’re usually pretty inexpensive to replace.

How come my battery gauge is off? Making an accurate battery gauge is much more difficult than measuring how much gas you’ve got in your car. Since a battery’s capacity is constantly decreasing, your gauge will likely get less accurate the longer you own your gadget. The length of a charge also depends on impossible-to-predict environmental factors like temperature. “The technology to measure batteries is just not that good,” Buchmann says. “We can’t do it. It’s that simple.”