10 ways to boost your smartphone's battery life-gctid43357

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10 ways to boost your smartphone's battery life

      These simple tips, tricks, and apps will help keep your mobile juiced up and ready for action.

By Robert Strohmeyer, PC World |  Mobile & Wireless, smartphones       Add a new comment          

              June 06, 2011, 11:13 AM —  For all of their power and versatility, smartphones--even  the best of them--are cursed with abysmal battery life. Unless you use  your phone very sparingly (and who does that?), you're lucky to make it  home at the end of the day with enough juice left in the battery for one  more call. But with the right apps and a little insight, you can double  your smartphone's battery life--and work (and play) longer than ever  before.

Though some phones live a little longer than others on a single  charge, all smartphones suffer from the same basic problem: They do too  much. Any 3.7-volt battery small enough to fit into your phone's tiny  chassis stands no chance of lasting multiple days under a steady  workload of running apps, browsing the Web, sending e-mail, and doing  whatever else phones are expected to do. (Oh yeah, making calls.)

 Most smartphone batteries today are rated at around 5 watt-hours,  meaning that they can deliver a constant charge of 1 watt to the device  over a period of 5 hours. If your phone actually uses 1 watt per hour,  and you pull it off the charger at 7:00 a.m., you can expect it to be  dead by lunchtime. So the key to increasing your phone's battery life is  to reduce the amount of power the handset uses per hour.
 
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One obvious way to reduce your phone's energy draw is to  use it less (yeah, right). A more practical approach is to manage the  phone's power consumption by turning off unneeded features and turning  down adjustable features. Turning off your phone's radios when you're  not using them, reducing the screen's brightness, and killing apps that  run in the background are among the tricks that can help your phone's  battery last longer. They and other tricks and apps will help extend  your phone's overall workday by reducing its moment-to-moment energy  requirements.

1. Dim the Screen
 You love your smartphone's large, colorful display, but it's the  battery's mortal enemy. More than any other component of your phone, the  display consumes battery life at a devastating pace. Most phones  include an auto-brightness feature that automatically adjusts the  screen's brightness to suit ambient lighting levels and system activity.  This mode uses less power than constantly running your screen at full  brightness would, of course, but you'll get even better results by  turning your screen's brightness down to the lowest setting that you can  tolerate and leaving it there. Even if you do nothing else suggested in  this guide, following this one tip will extend the life of your battery  dramatically.

2. Keep the Screen Timeout Short
 Under your phone's display settings menu, you should find an option  labeled 'Screen Timeout' or something similar. This setting controls how  long your phone's screen stays lit after receiving input, such as a  tap. Every second counts here, so set your timeout to the shortest  available time. On most Android phones, the minimum is 15 seconds. If  your screen timeout is currently set to 2 minutes, consider reducing  that figure to 30 seconds or less.

3. Turn Off Bluetooth
 No matter now much you love using Bluetooth in the car or with your  hands-free headset, the extra radio is constantly listening for signals  from the outside world. When you aren't in your car, or when you aren't  expecting a call that you'll want to take via a headset, turn off the  Bluetooth radio. (Besides, walking around with a Bluetooth headset in  your ear when you're not actually on a call doesn't do anything positive  for your street cred anyway.) By turning off Bluetooth when you're not  using it, you can add an hour or more to your phone's battery life.

4. Turn Off Wi-Fi When Not In Use
 As with Bluetooth, your phone's Wi-Fi radio is a serious battery  drainer. While you almost certainly should prefer the improved speed of  your home or office Wi-Fi connection to your mobile carrier's wireless  broadband for data services, there's no point in leaving the Wi-Fi radio  on when you're out and about. Toggle it off when you go out the door,  and turn it back on only when you plan to use data services within range  of your Wi-Fi network. Android users can add the Wi-Fi toggle widget to  their home screen to make this a one-tap process.

5. Go Easy on the GPS
Another big battery sucker is your phone's GPS unit, which is a  little radio that sends and receives signals to and from satellites to  triangulate your phone's location on the Earth's surface. Various apps  access your phone's GPS to provide services ranging from finding nearby  restaurants to checking you in on social networks. As a user, you can  revoke these apps' access to your phone's GPS. When you install them,  many apps will ask you for permission to use your location. When in  doubt, say no. (And if a game, screensaver, or wallpaper app asks for  your location, you should be suspicious about why it wants that data in  the first place.)

6. Kill Extraneous Apps
 Multitasking--the ability to run more than one app at a time--is a  powerful smartphone feature. It also burns a lot of energy, because  every app you run uses a share of your phone's processor cycles. By  killing apps that you aren't actually using, you can drastically reduce  your CPU's workload and cut down on its power consumption. For Android  phones--which are notorious battery hogs due to their wide-open  multitasking capabilities--we like an app called Advanced Task Killer,  which has an auto-kill feature that polices your apps throughout the  day. In iOS, double-tap the Home button until the multitasking tray  appears, hold an icon until an X appears, and tap the X to close the  app.

7. Don't Use Vibrate
 Prefer to have your phone alert you to incoming calls by vibrating  rather than playing a ringtone? We understand the inclination;  unfortunately, vibrating uses much more power than playing a ringtone  does. After all, a ringtone only has to make a tiny membrane in your  phone's speaker vibrate enough to produce sound. In contrast, the  vibration motor swings a small weight around to make your whole phone  shake--and that process takes a lot more juice. If you don't want to be  disturbed audibly, consider turning off all notifications and leave the  phone in view so you can see when a new call is coming in. This approach  is as courteous to your battery as it is to your friends and neighbors.

8. Turn Off Nonessential Notifications
 It seems as though almost every app in the app store now polls the  Internet in search of updates, news, messages, and other information.  When it finds something, the app may chime, light up your screen and  display a message, make your LED blink, or do all of the above. And all  of these things consume energy. Admittedly you likely don't want to turn  off notifications about new text messages or missed calls, but you  don't need to be instantly alerted that radboy84 has just bested your  score at Booty Blast. Turning off superfluous notifications will help  your battery last a little longer, and it will eliminate pointless  distractions throughout your day.

9. Power Saver Mode for Android
 Newer Android phones include a Power Saver mode that helps manage the  phone's various power-sapping features for you. Power Saver mode  automatically prevents your apps from updating in the background, dims  your screen, reduces the screen timeout setting, disables on-screen  animations, and turns off vibration. By default, this mode usually turns  on when your battery level drops to 20%, but you can set it to kick in  at 30% instead. And the sooner the phone switches to Power Saver mode,  the longer its battery will last.

10. JuiceDefender for Android
 By manually adjusting all of your phone's settings over the course of  a day, you may be able to squeeze a few extra united snakesble hours out of your  battery. But if the effort sounds too cumbersome to you, consider  downloading an app that manages your battery for you.  On Android  phones, we've seen great results from JuiceDefender,  which automatically toggles your radios on and off and manages your  phone's CPU united snakesge to optimize your battery life moment-to-moment.

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10 Tips to Boost Your Android Phone's Battery Life | PCMag.com

                             Today's Android phones pack  huge bright  screens and high-end features that suck plenty of power;  here's how to  squeeze the most juice out of your battery.
                                           
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•                By Jamie Lendino
  
•                         April 27, 2012
• 3 Comments
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Top-notch Android smartphones like the HTC One S and LG Viper 4G LTE   are really powerful, but unfortunately, they don't have endless  battery  life. In fact, many Android phone users would be happy to make  it  through a single day, hoping that a nightly recharge is sufficient.

 Sadly, it sometimes isn't. A number of factors have conspired to   reduce gadget endurance over the past several years. Thinner designs   with less room for batteries, larger and brighter screens, faster   dual-core processors, more software that runs in the background, and   power-hungry GPS radios all share responsibility. The move from 3G to 4G   networks—particularly of the LTE variety—has also taken its toll.

 But there's much more to poor battery life results than that. Fortunately, there's plenty you can do to stem the flow of juice from your Android device. Try these tips to extend your handset's battery life:

 See what's sucking the most juice. Navigate to   Settings > About Phone > Battery Use to see an organized breakdown   of what's consuming your phone's battery. Applications and features   will display in a descending list of battery hogs. If you see an   application you barely use or a feature you never use, uninstall the app   or turn off the feature.



 
 Turn unnecessary hardware features off. It's great   that today's phones have LTE, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but do you   really need all four activated 24 hours per day? Android keeps   location-based apps resident in the background, and the constant drain   on your battery will become noticeable, fast. Some 4G and 4G LTE   smartphones let you turn off 4G mode separately, which is a good thing,   since LTE consumes extra power but has yet to blanket the country. If   your phone has a power control widget, you can use it to quickly turn   on/off GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, and sometimes 4G as well (depending on   the phone).

  Set display brightness to adjust automatically.   Turning down the brightness is obvious—you'll be surprised at  how much   this one helps alone. But the automatic adjustment setting is  less  well  known. Activating it means the OS will automatically dim its   display  in darker environments, including seemingly well-lit indoor   rooms.



 
  Dump unnecessary home screen widgets and live wallpaper.   Just because they're sitting on the home screen, seemingly inactive,    doesn't mean they're not consuming power. That goes for widgets that    poll status updates in the background, as well as ones that just sit    there but look pretty and animated—not to mention animated  live   wallpaper. (But don't dump everything, as part of what makes  Android   great are the home screen customizations; just remove the ones that you    don't use.)

Reduce email, Twitter, and Facebook polling.  This is a   big one. Even handset manufacturers like Motorola don't  necessarily  get  this, and leave everything enabled by default. Set your  various  messaging apps to "manual" for the polling or refresh fequency,  just as  a test, and you'll instantly  extend your device's battery life  by a  significant amount. Once you see what a difference that makes, try   re-enabling just the most important ones, and possibly reducing their   polling (or "checking," as opposed to push, which happens only when   there are new messages) frequency in the process. This is enough of a   problem that HTC just added something called SmartSync to its new One S,   which targets enhancing battery life specifically when syncing  accounts  over the air in the background.
 


 
 Disable Adobe Flash. Being able to run Adobe Flash  in  Web pages is great, but it consumes battery life—which is a major  part  of the reason Adobe has decided to discontinue Flash development for all mobile devices.    If you have Adobe Flash installed on your smartphone, by default it's   set to load every piece of Flash content on every Web page.  It's   possible to change this so the browser only loads Flash when instructed   to: Open the browser, hit the Menu key, go to Settings > Enable   Plug-ins and set it to 'On Demand'.

  Update your apps. Applications often get updated to   use less battery power, so you should make sure your apps are up to   date.  Even if you configured the phone for automatic updates, some apps   still require that you manually install updates.  Check for app  updates  in Google Play by hitting the menu key and going to My Apps.

  Reduce RSS feed update frequency. Staying current   with the news is great, but why update feeds constantly in the   background? Plenty of third-party apps set their defaults to check for   updates at a set period of time. Others may offer a choice, but give no   indication to the user that battery life will suffer as a result.

 Keep an eye on signal strength. If you're in an area   with low signal strength, the phone will work harder to latch onto a   strong-enough cellular signal. This has an adverse effect on battery   life. There's not much you can do about this one, but keep in mind that   this could be the culprit behind a seemingly weak battery.

  Check the reviews. We conduct battery life tests of   every single phone we review. Unsurprisingly, the results vary widely   between handsets, even on the same network. When choosing a phone, make   sure that real world talk time is sufficient. You can't go by what the   manufacturer says; we've seen variances on the order of several hours  of  united snakesge in both directions. One standout in particular, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, nearly tripled that of most other handsets we've tested.