If you own an Android phone, your biggest worry probably is about the battery power. Android phones and tablets come with huge screens and amazing resolutions; they run feature-rich apps that you could enjoy for hours.People want to play games, watch videos, and listen to tracks on the move. They want to talk to their loved ones for hours, and at free time, want to play with their phones. Such mobile geeks want continued power from the battery that comes with their phones.
For instance, Samsung Galaxy S3 comes with a 2100 mAh battery supposedly giving 590 hours standby time. Apple iPhone 4S comes with 1432 mAh Lithium Polymer battery, and many people still say it runs longer than Galaxy S3. In fact looking at the complaints that people make about Android devices, the highest number of comments are about their battery power.
People want long-lasting batteries. They don’t appreciate temporary solutions like portable batteries or higher mAh third-party batteries that come with their own back cover tailor-made for specific phone models. In this article, let’s look at some simple solutions that will help your Android phone last longer on a recharge.
1. Close Unnecessary Apps
Android keeps an app that has been closed by pressing the ‘home’ button within its memory just so it could open it back faster, if required. All apps that you open are kept in the memory in this way, and if you go back to one of these apps, the operating system brings it up from the memory. Thus, going back to an already opened app on Android is pretty quick. Many people think this is inefficient and may drain the battery. However, Android’s basic architecture is like that and life cycle of an Android app progresses in this way. It will not affect the battery that much.
Therefore, believe it or not, you can press the ‘home’ button after using an app on your phone or tablet without any danger to the battery power.
However, if you have a service that constantly uses the data package (Wi-Fi connection or 3G/4G connections), such as an email application or the popular Twitter app, you may want to reconsider. You would actually want to turn off such applications from even the memory.
To take care of such apps, Android task manager could help. Go to Apps tab and then navigate to ‘Settings’. Tap ‘Manage Applications’. From here, you can ‘Force Stop’ a running application. Any app that actually runs in the background should be closed in this way. You have to do this only for social media apps and email programs that use your data connection.
2. Widget Usage
Widgets are like apps in the background as described above. If you have simple widgets like the ones that display date and time or the current system status, the phone’s battery will not be used a lot. However, if you have a widget that checks Twitter feeds or Facebook updates, it will drain your battery by constantly using the data plan. Such widgets should be removed from the home screen.
3. Bluetooth – Turn It Off
4. Wi-Fi Connection Management
3G/4G connections from your phone eat up your battery like anything! If I were you and I have a Wi-Fi hotspot access, I would immediately turn on Wi-Fi ‘always on’ feature. This will turn off the data access through 3G and instead would access the Internet through Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi connections take up a lot less power than 3G.
However, you have to manage your Wi-Fi access properly in order to maximize battery performance. If your phone is on the normal mode and there is no Wi-Fi network nearby, it will be constantly checking for available Wi-Fi hotspots by sucking up extra power. In order to better manage it, you have to either turn off Wi-Fi or have an app such as the Juice Defender or Green Power to manage it for you.
5. Traveling Mode
If you are on a long-distance trip and probably not going to attend any phone calls, then put your device on the offline mode. This turns off all access to the signal towers making your phone strain less and use less power.
6. Set Up the Display
Go to your phone’s display settings and set a timeout for your display. The shorter the timeout the better it is.
The display technology used on the phone also decides the battery performance. If you have a display such as the LCD TFT, it takes up more power than if you had an AMOLED display. For perfect black levels, AMOLED display takes no power at all. Hence, a darker background would save more power on an AMOLED phone (such as Samsung Galaxy S2, S3 or any other Samsung device out there). On the other hand, LCD displays as seen on iPhone take up the same power for displaying dark images as well as bright ones. Hence the power saving on LCD screens are not that great.
Also, turn down the brightness of the screen or make it automatic. All display settings can be found under ‘Settings->Screen and Display’.
7. App Updates
There are apps, such as the social media apps like Facebook and Twitter that look for software updates on occasion. These are software updates similar to Windows Update on your PC. This happens automatically in the background like a scheduled task. You can turn it off to save more power. You can find the settings under ‘Settings->Accounts and Sync.
Conclusion
On your Android device, you can see the usage of battery at ‘Settings->About Phone->Battery’ section. Check the usage of the battery to determine which app is using it the most and which the least. Battery savings on Android can be really great if you take care of your device properly and use the features provided well. In fact, you can manage battery yourself and don’t even have to install an app for that.