How To Make The Most Out Of Your Battery's Life

Make The Most Out Of Your Smartphones Baterry Life

Everyday, when we pick up our phones, we expect more and more out of the devices. Sure, improvements are made here and there but one thing which has been on a standstill is the situation of our devices battery life. Which brings us to the reason why you are here. How can i get more out of my devices battery life. Before we start, if you are reading this on your mobile device, I want you to lower your screens brightness and kill any other active app you are not using. That little approach will have a big impact on your battery life later on. Why? You ask. Well its simple, the display is the biggest battery drainer on your smartphone.

That said, there are still tons of tweaks and fixes you can use to really squeeze the most juice out of your phones battery power. We’ll be going into detail for each of these, and we’ll be moving at a pace that even tech newcomers to the Android operating system can follow.

So if you find yourself nodding and saying to yourself, “Yeah, yeah, I already know this stuff,” then feel free to skip on ahead. If you’re a serious, long-time user, you probably won’t find much here you don’t already know, but a refresher never hurts!

So without further ado, here is absolutely everything you need to know about getting the most out of your phone battery life: from routine maintenance to rooting and underclocking.

Turn off things you aren’t really using

A solid example, when you leave your home, its only natural to turn the lights off and maybe if you're not as lazy as me turn of all other electrical appliances and power outlets, simply because electricity costs money and the more you use, the more money you're gonna have to spend. In the same sense, leaving your WI-FI, Bluetooth or Location Service turned on all at the same time, common guys do you think that's necessary.

These guys are big culprits. If you want to conserve power, then you should always turn off your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Location (GPS) when you aren’t actively using them. If you’re want to be really aggressive with control over your battery, you might even want to experiment with disabling your mobile network connection when you know you won’t be using it as well.

Wi-Fi drains far less battery than cellular service.

Many users leave these features running all day without really thinking about it. Turning on Airplane Mode will knock out all of them in one fell swoop. Airplane Mode isn’t just for when you’re airborne, however. If you’re in an area where cell service is patchy, your phone can expend a lot of battery power trying to get the best connection it can.

So, turning on Airplane Mode or turning off your mobile data in favor of an available Wi-Fi network (except you're in Nigeria...if you know, you know) can make all the difference in the world. If you have the choice between using Wi-Fi or cell signal, always choose Wi-Fi, all other things equal. Wi-Fi drains far less battery than cellular service.

Shut down vibration

Vibration is wonderful if you’re in a situation in which you wouldn’t normally be able to hear your cell phone, such as being on the road. For many people, the subtlety of vibrating notifications is indispensable in their workplace (if you’re a lawyer, you can’t exactly have Crazy Frog going off every time you get a text message down at the firm).

However, smartphone vibrations aren’t conjured from magical resonating crystals. To produce the effect, your device has to spin up a small vibration motor every time, which can be really draining on your battery. This goes for haptic feedback as well, that light buzzing your phone may produce when you tap keys on your on-screen keyboard. If you really want to maximize your phone battery life, you should minimize your phone’s jiggliness.

Kill apps when you leave them?

Well Duh.... But before you go on, make sure you dont use an app killer asuuming you syill use Android Froyo for whatever reason. The problem is, these task killers became unnecessary even before they really got popular. Android has gotten really good at managing its own memory, and most of the apps that you murder this way will just spring right back to life. If anything, app killers suck battery rather than conserve it.

But there’s a new feature that’s been available since Android 4.0: the Recent Apps menu. Although this feature’s primary intent is to make swapping between apps faster, it is also possible to “swipe away” apps. Some myths have cropped up that it’s good practice to pull up the Recent Apps menu and swipe away any apps you aren’t using, effectively killing them.

This just isn’t true. For one, swiping away recent apps does not kill them. It is a good way to get an app to stop misbehaving (for example, if a Facebook photo gets stuck uploading, then swiping away the app will tell Facebook to cancel this action), but the apps you see on this list are not actively running in the background. The Recent Apps menu is nothing like the Task Manager on your PC, it’s just a visual catalogue to help you navigate your apps easier.

App killers suck battery rather than conserve it.

In the modern age of Android’s maturity, there’s no reason that killing apps should be a part of your everyday use of the device. Sometimes it’s possible for apps to go rogue and start hogging resources, but those are the kind of devils you want to put down for good. If part of your regular use of your phone involves app killing, you’re probably depleting battery life rather than saving it.

Use the internet intelligently

Mobile traffic makes up an incredible amount of internet use worldwide, and even though this amount is expected to continue to rise, most people are still accessing the internet very inefficiently. As I mentioned briefly above, you should always choose Wi-Fi over cellular service.

This will be easier on your data plan, sure, but even if you’re on one of those (increasingly rare) unlimited data plans, you’ll find that cell service hogs way more battery than Wi-Fi does.

However, just because your Wi-Fi receptor uses less battery than cellular service, it’s still a good idea to disable your Wi-Fi when you aren’t using it. Your phone is constantly searching for open connections while Wi-Fi is active, and that fruitless search can wreak havoc on your battery life.

Cut back on notifications

You don’t have to let your apps sync all of their data automatically. Choosing to do this manually, or to limit autosync to the apps that really need it, can seriously reduce power use.

Abandon auto synchronization

Auto Synchronization uses background processes that can eat into both your mobile data use and battery life. To turn it off, go to Settings > Accounts. Tap the three vertical dots in the upper right corner and uncheck “Auto-sync data.” You can also manually adjust which apps sync and how frequently.

Use ad-free apps

Not only are ads annoying, but ferrying that vibrant, eye-catching content to your device takes energy. Using apps that don’t use ads, or purchasing premium versions of apps that eschew ads, can drastically change how badly your battery takes a beating. If you use an app frequently, and it’s sucking up your phone’s life juice every day, consider upgrading or finding an ad-free alternative.

Adjust your display

Here we come to it. The MacDaddy of all battery sappage. Your display.

Head over to Settings > Battery. You should see a list of services that use your battery in order from the most battery hungry to the least. Which one is at the top there? Odds are extremely good that you’re looking at “Screen” by a large margin. Let’s see if we can’t make that display a little less demanding.

Dim your brightness

Well, that’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it? Full brightness might be necessary to see those texts under the full light of day, but why are you still running that setup after sunset? Tone it back a bit and use adaptive brightness or auto brightness depending on which version of Android you are running.

Decrease Animation Scale and Background Process

Time to get into some behind-the-scenes work here. To make these changes, we’ll need to access the Developer Options menu in your settings. However, unless you’ve unlocked Developer Options before, you’re not going to find them anywhere.

Reduce auto-lock time

Again, since your screen is the biggest enemy to your battery, keeping it off as much as possible is crux. Go to Settings > Display and change your “Sleep” length to be as short as is feasible. 15 seconds is a good amount.

Optimize wallpapers and themes

How your phone looks isn’t just aesthetic. It can also affect how long your device can stay alive on a single charge.

Ditch live wallpapers

Yeah, that massive spiral galaxy slowly swirling in glowing tranquility looks great on display units, but in everyday life, these gorgeous backgrounds take processing power to animate. Ditch the koi pond and stick with something more power-friendly.

Embrace the darkness (maybe)

And what is a power-friendly wallpaper? That actually depends on what kind of display you have!

There are essentially two kinds of displays currently on the smartphone market. AMOLED and LCD. AMOLED works by lighting up individual pixels to create images. LCD works by having a backlight that is overlaid by a screen that shutters and displays the backlight to create pixels which compose images.

This leads us to a counter-intuitive conclusion. If you have an AMOLED display, using a black wallpaper is the most power-efficient because the display doesn’t have to activate those pixels. They just get to rest. However, if you have an LCD display, the most power-efficient option is a white wallpaper because the screen doesn’t have to work to create the pixels. Strange but true.

It should be noted, however, that the benefit of having a white background on an LCD display is not as significant as the benefit of having a black background on an AMOLED display. If you’re not sure which you have, it won’t hurt much to err on the side of black.

Limit location services and background data

You could also squeeze a little bit more juice by turning off Location Services (usually found in Settings > Location Services). You might want to prevent apps from using your location info. You will also most likely want to disable the “Location and Google Search” option (or “Wi-Fi and Mobile Network Location” option on some phones) to prevent your device from using Wi-Fi and/or mobile networks for triangulating your precise location and sending the data to Google servers. The process, needless to say, requires power.

Keep an eye on apps that use data in the background. Some apps, such as the Play Store and Gmail apps, continuously collect and send data in the background. You can restrict such background usage of data — per app — and your battery will be the happier for it.

But, you can also perform a blanket restriction in Settings > Data Usage; tap the Menu button tick the “Restrict Background Data” option to enable it. You can also enable per-app restriction by opening each app’s info page.

(Note: The “Restrict Background Data” option may not be available in certain phone models. Also, Google itself considers per-app background data restriction as a “drastic measure that may also affect the app’s performance or cause it to malfunction,” so you might want to use this option with caution.)

Murder apps that betray you

Some apps are resource-intensive — either by nature (as in the case of games) or by developer incompetence or negligence (as in the case of poorly written apps).

You need to be vigilant about how your various apps consume battery power. A quick trip to Settings > Battery (or, on some devices, Settings > Power > Battery Use) will usually reveal which app or service is sucking most of the juice.

Identify apps that constantly drain CPU and battery life. Poorly coded apps that connect to the Internet even when they’re not supposed to should be uninstalled, as should apps that needlessly use up a huge amount of CPU resources. Replace these apps with better developed ones rather than endure running on less and less battery each day because of treacherous apps.

Use Battery Saver

Here’s a pretty straightforward one. Go to Settings > Battery and then tap the three-dot menu in the top right of the screen. Choose “Battery Saver” (hint: it’s the only option available in this menu).

Battery saver reduces your device’s performance and automatically limits vibration, location services, and background data. You can activate it from here, or you can set it to kick on automatically at 5 or 15 percent battery.

Root

Rooting is an advanced process that varies significantly from device to device. However, there’s no question that a number of battery saving techniques are available to root users that simply aren’t accessible to non-rooters. Some of these features include

• De-bloating
• Underclocking
• Custom Kernels And ROMs

Conclusion

Maximizing your battery life is a simple matter of minimizing your power usage. As you can see, your Android smartphone has a lot of components that touch on power use. Optimizing these can range from simply changing the way that you use your device on a daily basis to fully automating connectivity toggles.

However, at its core, battery conservation is very simple. I’ll reiterate my initial summary: dim your screen and turn off services you aren’t using. These two alone can go a long way toward making sure you aren’t that guy at the end of the day saying, “I can’t. My phone’s almost dead.”

Alternatively, you could also buy a power bank.

What are your favorite battery saving techniques? Did we catch all of them here? Let us know in the comments below!

Image Credit: Android Central