Five easy ways to improve your Android’s battery life

Does the battery of your Android phone last more than a day? If it does, you deserve an award! Most Android users complain about poor (or absolutely terrible) battery life of their smartphones. While we agree that smartphones are battery hogs, a few small tips here and there will definitely help your phone run for a much longer time. Here are five ways to boost your Android’s battery life.

Display 

The most important part of your phone when it comes to battery life saving is the display. If you’ve been keeping your display on 100 brightness at all times, congratulations, you have found the single biggest problem with your phone’s battery life. Screen brightness is inversely proportional to the battery life of the phone. In simple words, keep the brightness low! 

Display problems

Automatic brightness works well but unless you have a lot of viewing to do directly under sunlight, you don’t need a very bright screen. Also, ensure that your phone’s screen timeout isn’t left at 15 minutes. Have a short 30 second screen timeout. You’ll notice a considerable improvement in your phone’s battery life, if you follow even this one routine. 

Connectivity

Most people forget to turn off their Wi-Fi when they leave their homes or offices. They also forget to turn off GPS when location-based services aren’t required. We have observed in all our battery tests that Wi-Fi takes up a considerable amount of battery life, so if you’re on the move, don’t keep the Wi-Fi signal on. Your phone will constantly look for networks to connect to. Keeping a power control widget on your home screen at all times to help you quickly see the connectivity options that are required to stay on, and those that aren’t. 

Another important thing to note is to ensure that your phone is near your Wi-Fi router. If it is at the edge of your router's Wi-Fi zone, it’ll constantly trying to connect to the Wi-Fi. For houses that have routers installed at one end, and with multiple walls, this becomes a necessity. 

Running out of juice?

Home Screen

 The contents on your homescreen are extremely essential in deciding how long the battery will last. Kick the kitten out of your phone’s animated live wallpapers, remove the Facebook and Twitter live feed widgets. It’s important to keep the home screen clutter-free and only keep the things that are very important to you. Even if they’re Google’s live wallpapers, it’s best you keep them off your home screen. If constantly wanting to have Twitter, Facebook updates is important, keep an update time interval so polling is restricted to minimum. 

Syncing

If e-mail is a priority, keep only email a priority. If the rest isn’t important, don’t have it on auto sync at all time. With auto sync on for all your applications and services, you significantly suck up the juice in your battery. You can simply turn off syncing for Finance, News, Facebook, Twitter, Weather and other options, unless it’s absolutely necessary. Or, as mentioned earlier, enter the settings and tweak the options. For example, you don’t need to know the weather every minute; keep an update interval of about 2 - 3 hours. 

Identify the problem

Battery Use

Android has a neat little function that lets you view what is taking up most of the battery life. System Settings –> Battery Use lets you view quantitatively what task or function is taking up your phone's battery life. As a test, we tried reducing the brightness to a minimum and the screen tab showed a significant drop in percentage. It’s also worth mentioning that you need to shut down games and apps, and not let them stay running in the background. The more strain you put on the performance of the handset, the quicker the battery will drain out. Does your phone has a ‘cool’ feature like, say, Smart Stay? Turn it off, please. 

Last but not least, do check out our battery life tests on the phones we review. They’ll give you a clear idea of the battery’s performance, in case you’re picking up a new phone. That’s sums up our list. Have some more tips? Let our readers know in the comments section below.