As an Android smart phone user, you probably appreciate the importance and convenience of a long-lasting battery. Sometimes a little extra battery life makes all the difference - whether it's having enough juice to find an address, send the message or make the call. And although Android users likely appreciate how much more powerful their smart phones are than the alternatives, additional functionality costs battery life. Luckily, there are a number of steps Android users can take to help save Android battery. In the following article, you will find a few of the web's favorite tips for squeezing a little extra juice out of your Android smart phone.
Know Your Enemy. The first step any Android user must take to save Android battery is determining the cause of his or her battery drain. The latest OS should allow most users to determine battery usage rates quite easily and, if not, then several applications provide the service for free or very cheap. In your smart phone's Settings page, simply navigate to About Phone and then to Battery Usage. The Battery Usage page displays a breakdown of which features use the most battery. By ascertaining which of your smart phone's features are draining the most battery, you can adjust your phone's settings and behavior to reduce battery drain.
Dim or Change the Backlight. Although not always the case, "display" is often times a long-lasting battery's greatest threat. You can solve this by navigating back to Settings. From there, select Display and then Brightness. Once you've located your phone's Brightness settings, simply dim the background light completely. If you cannot comfortably view your phone's background at its lowest luminosity, then increase the brightness until your background is comfortably visible. This step will decrease the amount of battery your phone's display requires and, if you have an AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screen, you can reduce a display's battery drain even more drastically by having any background colors displayed in black.
Lastly, to further reduce the amount of battery your display requires, you can set your phone's screen timeout to a shorter duration. To do so, simply navigate from Settings to Sound and Display. Once in Sound and Display, select Screen Timeout. This feature informs of the phone of its user's preference for when the background screen blacks out. The shorter the duration, the greater the battery savings, so select the shortest duration that's convenient for you.
Kill the Background Apps. Finally, in addition to the display, applications running or syncing in the background can drain your Android phone's battery life, so while you're discovering which features use the most battery, also determine which applications use the most. Your phone should allow you to see this information quite easily. Simply return to Battery Usage (Settings > About Phone > Battery Usage). Because every user has different applications on which they rely most heavily, it is impossible to give personalized instruction. That said, however, there are some general steps one can take to limit applications' background battery drain.
For starters, disable or alter the settings of applications which sync frequently. Native email applications, for instance, can drain battery by syncing email every 15 minutes. Thus, to increase battery savings, users can simply visit their General Settings and select their phone's Email Check Frequency. By disabling the application's sync function, users save the most battery. If completely disabling the sync function won't work for you, however, any decrease to sync frequency should save Android battery.
The same or similar steps can be taken for any other application that syncs in the background and uses a lot of battery. Examples include Twitter and Facebook. To reduce or eliminate Facebook's syncing, users can simply navigate to the main Facebook page and from there select Settings to decrease the application's Refresh Interval. What is more, if you find that some applications which you rarely or never use are draining your phone's battery life, then simply delete or uninstall the application.
For smart phone users, battery life is a critical issue. Some users purchase phones on that criterion alone - some even choosing Apple over Android for iPhone's superior battery life. Luckily, even while Android OS phones continue to advance technologically, small changes can make a big difference in battery life. Following the foregoing tips should help save Android battery while, hopefully, not detracting from users' experience.
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