6 Tips to increase Android Battery Time
By Farrukh Anwar | September 25th, 2012Smartphones in general don’t produce a good battery time, as a daily smartphone user I can’t go a day without it, but low battery vows have always made me to think twice before I pull it out on a long trip to listen music, take pictures, watch videos or browse the internet. That restrains me from taking full advantage of my device; however there are some precautionary measure that you can take to save every ounce of juice.
1. See what is draining the battery
First thing first is analysis, check which application, either system or hardware is using the most amount of battery. To do that, go to settings – Battery this is for ICs and above, for below 4.0 go to settings – about phone – battery, here you see the battery drain by percentage with respect to every application/ system hardware.
2. Reduce the Display brightness
Next thing you can do is sacrifice a little bit of light; reducing the backlight below half will instantly result in longer battery timings, that is if you don’t mind low backlight. If that is not the case then you can use the auto backlight feature, the sensors in your phone will automatically adjust the brightness according to your surroundings, you could end up saving a lot of juice in the end.
3. Turn unnecessary hardware off
That headline is pretty obvious, you should turn all unused options off, because they keep running in the background and they keep using the battery, system hardware such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS drains the most amount of battery, background sync will use hardware as well – GPRS or 3G network will be used, turning that off will save both battery and your money.
4. Dump unnecessary Widgets and live wallpapers off
One of the most attractive feature of Android is widgets. Widgets are a quick way to access the applications meanwhile live wallpaper is there just for the looks. Turn them both off, use minimum widgets and you will save precious battery. Along with that, set screen auto turn off 30 seconds so that it does not stay awake unnecessarily.
5. Say Good bye to haptic feedback
Haptic feedback is the vibrating response you get when you touch or perform certain functions on your phone, example; the vibration when you press a keyboard key, haptic feedback takes a lot of power as well, if you must preserve you battery then you should. Simply go into settings > Sound > Haptic feedback and turn the option off.
6. Use different applications to control the battery usage
If your device is rooted than you have unlimited possibilities, there are several applications like set cpu which you can use to set a frequency of processor at different phases, for example – you can set the frequency low when the screen is off, or push it to max when in demand, it lets you control how your phone responds. If you don’t have a rooted device, you can use applications like “Juice defender” to control data usage and Wi-Fi usage automatically, it will also tweak few settings to make the battery last longer.
There is so much you can do to save up the battery, most of the smartphones can only handle a day out of rough use – taking these pre cautionary measures will give you a chance to save it up, if we missed any essential technique or application please let us know via comments.