10 Tips to improve battery life of your Android Smartphone

10 Tips to improve battery life of your Android Smartphone

For past 10 years or so processor speed, RAM and CPU load increased more than 10 fold, comparatively in terms of battery technology there was a little improvement. But good news is that you can get lot more battery life from your Android smartphone by strategically adjusting some settings and disabling a few unwanted features. Here we will discuss in-depth the Top 10 ways to squeeze out most battery life out of your Android smartphone.

Note

Below screenshots are taken from a Google Nexus Device with Android v5.0.2 installed. If your phone has a different version of Android or have skin on top of Android (TouchWiz,HTC Sense), the interface may differ slightly. Readers are advised to keep that in mind

10. Enable Power Saver mode

Turn on Power Saver mode when you are running low on battery. Android 5.0 Lollipop comes with inbuilt power saver mode. Along with Android 5.0, Phones like Galaxy S5, HTC one M8 comes with ultra power saving mode, even though they do not have Lollipop. On certain phone it can be configured such that it turns on power saving mode when battery juice goes below certain level. Power saving mode restricts some radio, data and sync function to squeeze out an extra hour of run-time or standby time up to a day.

9. Use Darker wallpaper

Displays are illuminated by back light residing behind that pixels. Two main type of display technology used in  today’s smartphones, LCD and AMOLED. LCD illuminates the whole display or a portion of it at a time, whereas AMOLED illuminates each and every pixel individually. By using darker wallpaper you are forcing the phone to use less power on illuminating the pixels. If your phone has AMOLED display then the power saving will be more power efficient.

8. Disable Automatic synchronization of email, Facebook,Twitter

Apps like Facebook Twitter, Gmail used to synchronize to the server all the time by using mobile data/WiFi. You can increase battery life significantly by setting these apps to synchronize manually.

7. Turn off vibration

Who doesn’t like the haptic feedback  while typing, but you should know that the vibration motor sucks a good amount of battery juice to provide you that convenience. To turn haptic feedback off go to  Settings > Sound & notification > Other sounds and turn off Vibrate on touch feature. This will provide you talk time of more than 10 minuets during a charge cycle.

6. Delete unnecessary Widgets

Try to keep your home screen to minimal. Just because your widgets are standing idle in your home screen does not mean they are not consuming power. Only keep those widgets which you use every day. Delete all other rarely used widgets to improve battery life of your smartphone. To remove widget, long press on them and move them to the trashcan icon present at the top or bottom of your screen.

5. Disable gesture and voice activated features

Gestures like eye tracking, voice activation, voice control, air-gesture consumes lots of battery power even when you are using your phone,whereas they provide a little convenience to the user. We would suggest you to disable these gimmicky features to stop power consumption by them. Different power make has different settings for these gestures. You will find some toggle somewhere in the settings menu to disable these gestures.

4. Turn off WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC

Turn off WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC and wireless data whenever you do not need them. Only turn them on when you are in need of them. Bluetooth and NFC are used occasionally hence turn them on only on the instance when you need them. Try to turn off WiFi and mobile data whenever you do not need data services on your phone. This will save significant amount of battery power to extend overall battery life of your smartphone.

3. Turn off GPS and location services

Do you really need precise GPS based location service throughout the day? in 99.99% of the cases the answer is no. So why keep GPS on throughout the day? GPS positioning is a complicated task and requires lots of processing and battery power. If you leave GPS on throughout the day Google will use it throughout the day to know your precise location to provide you GPS based Google Now cards and targeted adverting. Facebook, Twitter app also uses GPS location services if it’s left turned on 24×7. Turn on GPS and location services only when you need navigational assistance from your smartphone, this is good for your battery as well as privacy.

2. Figure out power hog apps

Minimized and suspended apps can still consume lots of battery power. Go to Android battery monitor and see which set of apps are draining most juice. And depending on your needs you can close , disable or even uninstall power hog apps to improve battery life significantly.

1. Lower Screen Brightness and screen timeout

Easiest and most effective way to save battery for any smart device is by keeping the brightness down. In most of the cases display consumes about 40% of the battery juice. Keep your screen brightness at 50% or less this will substantially improve your battery life of your Android smartphone. If you leave your screen brightness at auto (adaptive brightness) this may drain battery juice quickly when you are outside in bright sunlight. You can adjust screen brightness at Settings > Display > Brightness level