Many Android phone users would be happy to make it through a single day hoping that a nightly recharge is sufficient. Sadly, sometimes this is not the case, as Android phones battery life would not guarantee that.
A number of factors have conspired to reduce gadget endurance over the past several years.
Today’s Android phones pack big bright screens and high-end features that suck plenty of power. Thinner designs with less room for batteries, larger and brighter screens, faster quad-core processors, more software that runs in the background, and power-hungry GPS radios all share responsibility. The move from 3G to 4G networks a few years ago, particularly of the LTE variety, has also taken its toll.
But there is much more to poor battery life results than that. Fortunately, there is plenty you can do to stem the flow of battery life from your Android device.
Here is how to get the most use out of your battery:
- See what is consuming much of battery power
Navigate to Settings > Battery to see an organized breakdown of what is 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, you will want to uninstall the app or turn off the feature.
- Reduce Email, Twitter, and Facebook polling
Set your various messaging apps to ‘manual’ for the polling or refresh frequency, just as a test, and you will 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 frequency in the process.
- Turn unnecessary hardware radios off
It is great that today’s phones have LTE, NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but do you really need all five activated 24 hours a day? Android keeps location-based apps resident in the background, and the constant drain on your battery will become noticeably fast. If your phone has a power control widget, you can use it to quickly turn on/off GPS (the largest power drain), NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. On stock Android, swipe down to bring up the Notification bar, and then tap the icon on the top right corner.
- Use the extra power saving mode if you have it
Most phones now come with Ultra Power Saving and Extreme Power Saving modes that limit the phone to texting, phone calls, Web browsing, and Facebook. This can squeeze extra hours or even a day of standby time out of just a few remaining percentage points of battery.
- Trim apps running in the background
From Settings > Apps, swipe to the left; you will see a list of apps that are currently running. Tap on each one to see what they are for; you can stop any apps that you do not need running in the background all of the time.
- Dump unnecessary home screen widgets and live wallpaper
Just because they are sitting on the home screen, seemingly inactive, does not mean they are not consuming power. This 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 you don’t use.
- Turn down the brightness and turn off Automatic Brightness
It is probably obvious at this point, but you will be surprised by how much this one alone helps to improve battery life.
- 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.
- Keep an eye on signal strength
If you are in an area with poor cellular coverage, the phone will work harder to latch onto a strong-enough signal. This has an adverse effect on battery life. There is not much you can do about this one, but keep in mind that this could be the culprit behind a seemingly weak battery; it is worth popping the phone into Airplane mode if you don’t need data or voice calls.
- Check the reviews
There is battery life test on every single Android phone. 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 cannot go by what the manufacturer says; we see variances on the order of several hours of usage in both directions on a regular basis.
- Buy a battery case or a larger extended battery or a power bank
Battery cases combine a hardware enclosure, which protects your phone, with an extended battery that can double your phone’s endurance. You can find models compatible with popular Android phones from a variety of manufacturers. Power bank are device that you can pack with power to revive your Android device when it is fast losing fire.