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10 Ways Android Smartphones Can Have Better Battery Life

Posted In Android, Kindle Fire, Mobile - By Techtiplib on Tuesday, April 8th, 2014 With No Comments »

Many smartphone users are comfortable using an Android smartphone, but they may not be particularly enthralled with the device’s battery life. They may start the day at 8 AM with fully charged battery and find that it is nearly drained in the evening. They may try to keep the device plugged at their desk, but it isn’t possible if they need to travel a lot. Many Android devices have about 2000mAh battery, which is somewhat unimpressive as smartphone batteries go.

Short battery life is an often-heard lament among Android users and the increasingly powerful internal hardware also adds strain on these powerpacks. Old BlackBerry devices could last up to two days on a full charge; but they were clearly less functional than current Android smartphones. Today, users typically ask for driving direction, sync documents, manage calendars, read social media updates, shuffle webpages and play a game or two. It’s true that Android smartphones has one distinct advantage over the Apple iPhone, that is users could replace the battery with a spare cell. But this is still won’t help them much if they are off the grid for nearly a week.

Android battery life-10 Ways Android Smartphones Can Have Better Battery Life

Each time our Android smartphone runs out of juice even before the dinnertime begins, we should become more motivated to find ways to preserve our battery life. Fortunately, there are ways to help our smartphone stay afloat somewhat longer and these steps can be applied to multiple Android models as well. Here are things Android fans could do add an hour or more to their overall battery life.

  1. Disable some communication features: Current Android smartphones are equipped with multiple communication features and we can turn them off when not used. These include NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi and – the real power hog – GPS. Users can swipe the settings down to disable/enable these features. In most cases, we only need to enable the WiFi connection and we should also disable it when we utilize the built-in 3G/4G connectivity feature. Enabling the airplane mode could also save battery life, but we should use it only if we don’t need to communicate with anyone or access the web in more than an hour. Reconnecting to networks need larger amount of power.
  1. Enable power saving feature: This is a Samsung-only feature and it manages the processor, display and haptic feedback to reduce power consumption. Users could enable it by swiping down the top of the main screen and tap the gear-like icon to open the Settings interface. There are additional options users can choose to improve the effectiveness of power-saving mode.
  1. Adjust the display: Configuring the display of our smartphone can help to preserve battery life. We may need to lower the brightness level manually, because the “Automatic brightness” feature doesn’t always work consistently on many Android smartphones. Users can go to Settings> Display and adjust the brightness level manually. The display should also dim after a period of inactivity and users can define the timeout by going to Settings> Accessibility. Users can choose different screen timeout time, from 15 seconds to 10 minutes of inactivity. But they need to set the screen to dim at an appropriate time, since if display is turned off to quickly, it could cause some aggravation. Users should experiment to find a proper balance. Samsung offers the “Smart Stay” feature that dims the display only when we are not staring at the screen.
  1. Look for power-hungry apps: Many apps are vicious resource and power hogs, we should be careful when opening them. Users could review power usages by opening the Settings> Battery and check each app to gain more information. The core Android OS and Google Play Store app could take a large percentage of our battery usage. But unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do about this, because they are critical software components of our smartphone. We can’t force stop the Google Play Store and it is obviously impossible to disable the Android OS itself.  Location-based features are particularly power-hungry and we should limit the number apps that require our location details. Again, it’s always a good idea to regularly review our apps and remove those we don’t need.
  1. Configure options: Our Android smartphones come with some functional features, but we don’t really need them all. As an example we could turn off the Multi Windows and Screen Mirroring feature, if they are not needed. We also need to disable the Vibrate feature and mute the speaker if we don’t plan to listen to any song. There are other things that we could disable, such as options in Settings> Motion. We should regularly check the settings and disable anything we don’t consider as necessary. This simple step could help us cut down on power and resources usage.
  1. Review our accounts: By configuring our email and other accounts, we could save some battery life. Go to Settings> Accounts> Email to view all email accounts in our devices. Instead of letting the email service to sync the account every 15 minutes, we could set it at every one or two hours. We could also configure the roaming settings and define peak schedule for email syncing. The “Push” feature means that new messages will be displayed on the screen if they are available in the mail server. Setting the Push feature to “1 hour” could help us lower battery consumption, since the phone will look for new email messages less frequently.
  1. Use cloud services less often: The cloud service is important because it delivers new information, syncs document and handles backups. This activity needs plenty of data transfer and our Android smartphone has to go the extra mile to provide us with everything we need. Many Android users love their Dropbox account, but it could quickly chew up battery life, especially when we need to download a lot of things. We could ask Dropbox to sync only when the WiFi access is available, which allows us to pull the data down with less power requirements. Some smartphones users have plenty of PDF files they regularly read and they could set them as “Favorite”. Only PDF files are downloaded when they open it. Alternatively, users can copy specific files manually to their Android smartphone, by making the usual drag and drop movements.
  1. Limit multimedia use: Music and videos could drain battery significantly and users should be really conservative in their multimedia use. As an example, they could use an old feature phone as MP3 player, when users got the gym. This way, they won’t have to use Android devices for listening to music. People on a camping trip and others who are far away from the wall socket should skip the entertainment.
  1. Use resources management apps: Many of us are skeptical about these apps, but some of them actually have some merit. Cleanmaster closes processes that take too much resource and monitor things that run on our device. This means, users don’t have to close the program manually. It comes with a feature to restore some of RAM quickly and make the Android OS works less. JuiceDefender manages our smartphone device and it disable connectivity options at specific times, especially when the network is not available. It could also disable mobile data/WiFi if users are reading on their device.
  2. Use extended battery: The above tips should work well on many Android devices, but the real solution to this problem is by adding the overall power capacity. The additional battery can be attached to the rear cover of the device, which certainly makes the device thicker.

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