Monday, June 18, 2012

Tips & apps to improve phone’s battery life

--ET Bureau

You could have the most powerful smartphone around, but that amounts to naught if it dies out on you every few hours. Here are a few simple tips and apps and to maximise your phone's battery.

Tip 1: Screen brightness
Although most phones come with a light sensor that is used to automatically adjust brightness of the display, you need to manually set the brightness as low as possible to maximise battery life. The automatic setting constantly alters the brightness and that leads to higher consumption.

Also, keep the screen time out as short as possible to save more battery.

Tip 2: Wireless connectivity
Functions such as EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS are important to phone usage, but they are the biggest battery hogs as well.

You can increase your battery life by switching off functions that you don't need. Even switching from 3G to 2G (if available) will give your battery life a huge boost.

Tip 3: Push notifications
If push notifications are turned on, your phone constantly pings various services to check for updates. Therefore, data connectivity or Wi-Fi is constantly being used to check for updates.

Some devices even play a sound and display a notification on the screen. The number of different notifications you leave on will have a direct impact on the phone's battery life.

Tip 4: Background tasks
By default, pressing the home button does not exit apps, it just moves them to the background — this helps with quicker multitasking on a smartphone. Problem is, even background apps consume hardware resources (except on iOS where the apps are completely suspended).

Use a task manager to exit apps completely and give a boost to battery life.

Tip 5: Haptic feedback
Many touchscreen phones offer haptic feedback -— a slight vibration while typing, pressing an on-screen button or in some phones, every time the screen registers a touch. Check if you can turn this feature off or control when the vibration occurs.

You can also choose to turn off the vibrate notification for calls/SMS when the ringer is on.


App for BlackBerry phones: Battery Saver Pro
Provides a clean graphical user interface with features to monitor processes, optimise usage for display/wireless connections, set alerts for low battery and can show a battery usage graph.

App for iOS devices: Battery Life Pro
This app has a beautiful user interface and shows you system info & graphs for memory usage. It also gives you one-touch access to switch on/off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G & push notifications.

App for Windows Phone: BatterySaver
BatterySaver lets you pin live tiles on your home screen to quickly toggle between various battery consuming functions such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth & GPS.

App for Android devices: JuiceDefender
This app offers balanced, aggressive or extreme battery saving presets.

Select one and it automatically manages phone features to improve battery life. You can even customise individual options to create a preset of your own.

--Karan Bajaj





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