How to increase your Android Smartphone’s battery life?     

 

Many of you who are using Android Smartphones may have noticed one thing in common; that is it’s short battery life. Normally Android Smartphones like the iOS devices drain the battery faster, but it is normal as it is indeed a Smartphone (actually a mini computer) which use lots of computing power which lead to increased battery usage.

Many of our visitors insisted us to write some useful tips to increase the Android battery life, so here we go, this article gives you the complete set of tips which will increase your smartphones battery dramatically (at least by 75%).

Please note that the some tips may not apply to some while others do and vice versa. For example, if some one who is using the phones GPS frequently and if we ask him to turn it off, he may not accept it, so please skip the ones you are not able to do and do the rest which suits you.

Before going further you need to know what processes are actually consuming your phone’s battery, to get the detailed report go to, Settings –> About Phone –> Battery. Here you will get a visual display of top processes and hardware which consumes your Smartphone’s battery. Now we have to act accordingly.

Here are some tips How to increase your Android Smartphone’s battery life

1. Display and Brightness

The main villain behind an Android Smartphones (or any other mobile phone) battery draining problem is it’s display which consumes a lot of battery without any regret. You may know that most of the Android phones have larger screen size which will lead to increased battery usage. Always try to buy a medium screen sized phone.

Buy an Android phone which uses AMOLED display (but costs more), because TFT display consumes more battery resource than it’s AMOLED counterpart.
Set the display brightness manually rather than “Automatic” as most of the times the automatic settings will set the display brightness higher than what actually needed. Also, set the display turn off time as short as possible. To adjust the display brightness go to Settings->Display->Brightness.
Avoid using live wallpapers as it consume a lot of battery resource.

2. Disable WiFi and Bluetooth radios when not in use

The next culprit behind an Android smartphone battery drainage issue is the radios in it like the WiFi and Bluetooth. If you disable them when not in use it will save a lot of battery.

To disable WiFi, go to, Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Airplane mode.

To disable Bluetooth, go to, Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Bluetooth

If you are using your phone as a data modem, then try to connect using USB data cable when ever possible rather than the WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity and also try to avoid WiFi usage during low signal availability.

Switch to 2G networks when ever possible and especially when the 3G or 4G signals are weak, this will save a lot of battery power.

3. Remove unwanted widgets

Widgets are always useful but determine whether you need all of them on your home screen as a lot of widgets results in more battery usage. Remove the ones that are less frequently used.

Try to avoid widgets which need data access frequently like the Facebook and Twitter clients, but if you badly need them increase their refresh rate and if possible set the refresh rate to manual.

4. Kill/Uninstall unwanted apps

Many of you might be unaware that there are a lot of unwanted apps running in the background of our Android phone which consumes lot of CPU and data resource that leads to increased battery usage on the device.

First, you need to know which all apps are really needed and kill all of them which are not used. Use apps like Advanced Task Killer (free) to full fill this task.

Alternately you can try an automatic task killer app which does the trick automatically when the phone is in sleep mode.

We recommend TaskPanel XTRA (free). With it, you can add a list of apps to be killed when the phone enters the sleep mode which results in a lot of battery saving.

We recommend adding all the apps excluding Media Players, Browser, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter (if you need live notifications) on the kill list.

Some users have noticed that the apps get reactivated automatically even after killing them with task manager, so if that is the case uninstall it (if you no longer need them) rather than killing, which saves lot of computing power, disk space, and battery resource. To uninstall apps got to, Settings –> Applications –> Manage Applications and click “Uninstall.”

5. Disable GPS when not needed

GPS is one of the top battery eaters in an Android phone, so disable it when ever possible to save a lot of resources. If you are using it for navigation, select “WiFi/Mobile networks” as your location finder. It will be less accurate but saves a lot of battery power.

A large number of apps are also using the GPS for various reasons, disable it in the corresponding app settings.

Apps like the Twitter client, weather apps, etc. uses GPS for location tracking, disable them if not necessary.

You must enable GPS if you are using Google Maps for navigation purposes, else disable it where ever possible.

To disable GPS got to, Settings –> Location ->”Use GPS satellites” (uncheck it) and check “Use Wireless Network.”

6. Disable apps which Sync frequently

Most of you might be unaware that the “push email” feature which delivers emails directly to our phone’s inbox will drain a lot of battery resource, push mail is indeed a good feature but no to so good for the battery. So either disable the automatic refreshing of mails or increase the “Email Check Frequency” to a maximum value possible. To change the “Email Check Frequency,” settings Open the Email app, select the account and

go to Account settings –> “Email check frequency” (adjust the frequency here).

Facebook and Twitter apps also sync with the external servers for notifications, status updates, etc. These are all cool features, and we all love both Facebook and Twitter but if you are on the move and don’t want to drain your battery in the middle of the day then disable these notifications or completely avoid using the apps and try to access the web version of the phone browser.
You can adjust the automatic syncing of Facebook and Twitter apps by going to;

For Facebook, go to Settings –> Refresh interval (try to set it to a maximum value as desired)
For Twitter, go to Settings –> Background Updates
You can either increase the refresh interval or disable the notifications completely.

7. Use apps which fine tune your device to increase battery life

Last tip, but not the least, many apps are already available in the Android Market which will help you to save a lot of battery resource by simply installing it and enabling it. Some of them are listed below.

JuiceDefender

JuiceDefender (free) is the most popular and effective battery saving app currently available which will marginally improve your Android smartphone’s battery without much strain. Even though the JuiceDefender is customizable, the preset profiles are more than enough for a normal user.

We hope that this article (How to increase your Android Smartphone’s battery life) would be helpful for you.