The battery is possibly the most critical component in an Android smartphone, but it’s the one area of technology that has been struggling to keep up recently.
With hungry screens, a camera and radios on the one hand, and a demand for ever-thinner devices on the other, the poor rechargeable battery is being squeezed on both sides. And Android phones are possibly the worst culprit in this regard. So, what can you do to squeeze the most from your little green robot-driven friend?
1. Auto-brightness means a huge saving
Let’s start with the obvious. The biggest drain on a smartphone battery is its display, so head for Settings>Sound & display and scroll down to Brightness. See if your device has an ‘Auto-brightness’ setting (not all do). Turn it on, thereby ensuring that the screen backlight or OLED brightness is only ever doing what it needs to do and nothing more.
2. Stay away from Live wallpapers
Along with the physical display, what you do with it can also affect battery life significantly. ‘Live wallpapers’, introduced for Android 2.1, may look pretty and are great for showing off down the pub, but they eat up processor power and you’ll do yourself a huge favour by having a simple static wallpaper.
3. Black is best
Also notable when looking at the display is that the whiter the content being shown, the more power is being used up. The effect is noticeable for standard TFT displays, with white wallpapers and largely white applications using up to twice as much power as black varieties, but for AMOLED screens the difference is dramatic – up to fifteen times more power is used showing the white Google home page as when showing the mainly black Android ‘Settings’ hierarchy. Admittedly, the colours and shades used are usually beyond your control (as most applications control their own), but be aware of the effect and choose wisely when you get the choice of themes, wallpapers or colour schemes.
4. Shorter timeouts
A final point on the screen front is that if, like us, you often pick up and use your Android phone and then put it down again without manually turning the display off (usually with a button press), it’s worth turning down the screen timeouts (again, in Settings> Sound & display) so that the display auto-dims or turns off sooner on its own. There’s no point in having power oozing from the screen for a whole minute unnecessarily.
5. Introducing radios
The next biggest battery-drainer is your phone’s radios. No, not that sort of radio. We’re talking Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 2G, 3G and GPS circuits, all with power-hungry antennae. Every single Android phone either has a ‘Power control’ widget or has the same toggles built-in to the notifications bar, so there’s no excuse for not knowing how to turn things off.
6. Data is the killer
But the real biggie on the wireless front is cellular data – 2G and 3G. When you’re close to a cell tower, your Android smartphone can transmit at quite low power levels – but when you’re miles away or travelling on a train or as a passenger in a car, your device can emit quite prodigious amounts of RF energy. All of which is coming straight from your battery.
7. Not online all the time
What can be done? Use 3G data cautiously when away from city centres and cell towers. Rather than letting your Android phone push Gmail (for example, and/or Twitter) all through the day, manage its syncing by toggling off the ‘Sync’ function (again, in the ‘Power control’ widget). If you’ve got 3G data going for another reason then install the freeware APNdroid (the small double arrow widget), which cleverly renames your cell network data access point name, therefore killing the connection stone dead. Trust us, this will save you a lot of power if you’re travelling.
8. Foregoing 3G
If you really want to save power permanently, disable 3G data altogether by going to Settings>Wireless & network>Mobile networks and checking ‘Use only 2G networks’. Now your internet speed, when called upon, will be a bit slower – but 2G (GPRS and EDGE) still delivers enough for email and Twitter, for example, while being far more power efficient and also with better call and data handling in low signal areas.
9. Bluetooth and GPS
Bluetooth isn’t usually a problem, especially if you use it a lot – for example, to keep a headset or car kit connected. After all, if you need it then you need it. But if you don’t use it much then keep it turned off by default and only turn it on when explicitly needed. The same is true of GPS, except that most phones should manage this automatically – you wouldn’t want the GPS receiver powered up all the time!
10. Filling to the ‘brim’
When charging your Android phone, wait until the battery indicator shows that charging has stopped – don’t just take the lead away after an hour or so. The last 20 per cent of charge ‘trickles’ in and takes a while, so be patient. Condition your battery better by filling it to the brim!
11. Now it’s time to take the next step …
Now that you’ve got a great feel for managing your Android phone’s power manually, if you’re a bit of a fiddler anyway, why not take the next step and investigate an automated way of doing a lot of the steps above? Download the popular JuiceDefender from the Android Market.
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