Battery Saving Tips for Android Phones
11 OCTOBER 11
Smartphones are fantastic for allowing us to do so much more, but the convenience of all of these additional features does come at a price - and that price is your battery life. When first making the leap from a standard mobile phone to a smartphone such as an Android phone, you may scoff at the idea of barely surviving one day without a charge. But with phones that now have large, vibrantly coloured screens, faster processors and the ability to do so much more than just calls and text, it does seem logical that the battery will drain faster - simply down to the fact that you're now using your phone for so much more.
You'll gradually get used to charging your phone when it's not in use - such as overnight, or maybe even whenever you're at your desk, but for general long-lasting battery life, or if you haven't had access to a charger and need to make that last 30% of battery go further, then check out these helpful tips below.
These simple measures will help prolong the battery life on your Android phone.
Check your battery use
Go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Usage. From here you will be able to track where your battery life is going, which may help you conserve when necessary.
Brightness
If you follow the above tip you'll see that your display is using the most of your battery. If you're in an emergency battery situation, the first thing you should do is reduce the brightness, to make those last few bars last longer.
Upgrade your firmware
Make sure your device is upgraded to the latest version of firmware. Battery life was one of the features that was significantly upgraded from the 1.x Android versions. One of the critical issues that was fixed was the messages application not going to sleep. Now the tool goes to sleep, which will make a huge difference in saving your battery from an untimely demise.
Turn off notifications
While they can be handy, unfortunately notifications can seriously drain your juice. You could choose to leave on notifications for text messages only. You can also turn off both sound notifications and LED notifications to save as much battery as you can. Just remember that you will have to manually check your email to see if anything is new since the last time you checked.
Turn off keyboard feedback
This one may not seem so obvious to most users, but that vibration does use a lot of power. As often as you use your keyboard, you're adding to the decline of your battery power click, by click, by click. Also, with the feedback turned off, your keyboard will respond much faster than it would with it on.
Wallpapers
If you want to save a few more hours of battery, then don't use Live wallpapers. They look fancy but seriously drain the battery life. There are heaps of vibrant, and great looking standard wallpapers available. If you really want to stick with the Live wallpaper then make sure you have a short timeout for your screen so that it will go to sleep when you're not using it.
Customise your battery!
To stay aware of how your battery is faring there is an app called BatteryLife that you can download to customise the colour of your battery image. For example you can set the thresholds to show above 75% as green, 25-75% orange, and under 25% red. Handy, so you can easily see when things are getting critical.
You'll gradually get used to charging your phone when it's not in use - such as overnight, or maybe even whenever you're at your desk, but for general long-lasting battery life, or if you haven't had access to a charger and need to make that last 30% of battery go further, then check out these helpful tips below.
These simple measures will help prolong the battery life on your Android phone.
Check your battery use
Go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Usage. From here you will be able to track where your battery life is going, which may help you conserve when necessary.
Brightness
If you follow the above tip you'll see that your display is using the most of your battery. If you're in an emergency battery situation, the first thing you should do is reduce the brightness, to make those last few bars last longer.
Upgrade your firmware
Make sure your device is upgraded to the latest version of firmware. Battery life was one of the features that was significantly upgraded from the 1.x Android versions. One of the critical issues that was fixed was the messages application not going to sleep. Now the tool goes to sleep, which will make a huge difference in saving your battery from an untimely demise.
Turn off notifications
While they can be handy, unfortunately notifications can seriously drain your juice. You could choose to leave on notifications for text messages only. You can also turn off both sound notifications and LED notifications to save as much battery as you can. Just remember that you will have to manually check your email to see if anything is new since the last time you checked.
Turn off keyboard feedback
This one may not seem so obvious to most users, but that vibration does use a lot of power. As often as you use your keyboard, you're adding to the decline of your battery power click, by click, by click. Also, with the feedback turned off, your keyboard will respond much faster than it would with it on.
Wallpapers
If you want to save a few more hours of battery, then don't use Live wallpapers. They look fancy but seriously drain the battery life. There are heaps of vibrant, and great looking standard wallpapers available. If you really want to stick with the Live wallpaper then make sure you have a short timeout for your screen so that it will go to sleep when you're not using it.
Customise your battery!
To stay aware of how your battery is faring there is an app called BatteryLife that you can download to customise the colour of your battery image. For example you can set the thresholds to show above 75% as green, 25-75% orange, and under 25% red. Handy, so you can easily see when things are getting critical.
