How to increase your Android phone’s battery life?

How to increase your Android phone’s battery life?

Android phones are becoming exceedingly popular and almost everyone has one these days. If there is one thing that is common to all Android handsets, it’s the battery life which sucks. Here are eleven sure shot ways to make your phone last longer. These battery-saving tricks can be applied to all Android phones, irrespective of their processor, features etc.

Buy an extended battery

Although most of these techniques will give you better life, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can go on for days without charging. If you are a traveller or if you use 3G and Wi-Fi on your phone frequently, it is recommended that you get a new battery, for there is no Android phone that has great battery life.  By getting a battery, you will almost be doubling battery life by sacrificing a little on the form factor. If you are not gonna change your phone in the recent future, it is a good idea.

Recommendation: Mugen Power Batteries – Worldwide free Shipping – Follow @MugenBatteries on Twitter to get a discount coupon.

Do not sync Facebook

We all love Facebook, sure. We love to show off by getting instant notifications and using it directly from our phone. But if you don’t want your phone to die in the middle of the day, you better turn Facebook sync off. Even though these are push notifications, it will not help getting one all the time for every like and every weird comment you get.

Facebook from your PC or Laptop is great. Stick to that. For your Android phone, just sync contacts and access the site via the browser.

Do not use 3G or Wi-Fi when the signal is low

When you are in an area which has poor signal, stick to EDGE and turn off Wi-Fi and 3G. Your phone will keep getting disconnected from the tower or booster repeatedly and switch between modes and that will cause your phone’s battery to get drained tremendously. You can also avoid this problem by switching to GSM mode and using WCDMA mode only when necessary.

Use GPS only when needed

Many Android phones (leaving low-range phones) have the option of trilateration. This means that you can use your mobile network to pin point your location. This works well on most devices and networks and should suffice for normal usage. Go to Settings –> Location and remove the check mark from Use GPS satellites. Make sure the other option,Use Wireless Network, is checked. This could save some charge.

Turn off automatic brightness

The display is the most important part of your Android phone. While you may think that the auto-brightness option will save battery, it is not the case. Most of the time, auto brightness will set your phone at 75 to 80 per cent brightness. But realistically, 30 (indoors) to 50 percent (outdoors) will be more than enough. If you have an AMOLED display, further decreasing the brightness is a good idea.

Also, you can decrease your display turn off time to 30 seconds. That will be good enough.

Do not use a Live Wallpaper

Live wallpapers were one of the most interesting things on your phone when Froyo came out. But talking in terms of battery, it will make your phone last at least 2 to 3 hours lesser on each charge and it is highly recommended that you turn off live wallpapers. Why? Live wallpapers will continue to be on the memory even when you lock the phone, so that there is no lag whenever you unlock or come back to the home screen. They also uses a certain amount of your CPU. Thus, not using live wallpapers makes a lot of difference.

Remove unnecessary (if not all) widgets from the home screen

Like your wallpaper, your homescreen widgets will also use memory and the CPU. The lesser widgets you have, the better. Avoid 3D widgets and especially those which use the internet. The Facebook, Twitter, RSS, Stocks widgets all use more battery power.

In case you really need any of them, increase their refresh duration or do it manually. If you set it for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, a lot of your charge will get drained quickly. Again, it comes down to not showing off.

Use a proper task manager with automatic task killer function

You’ve probably got an automatic task killer now. But, many task killers in the Android market are crap. If you had noticed, most of the apps you close will come back up eventually. That just doesn’t solve our problem.

What you need to use is TaskPanel XTRA (it’s free, of course). The app closes apps properly so that they don’t come up. Also included is a killer list. Apps added to the list will automatically get killed whenever your screen is locked. Normally, this means you kill your apps once in every 30 seconds. That’s great and it all happens when you press the lock key.

So, what apps should you add to the killer list?

Almost everything. It’s good to most of the apps, they will only take memory. The only things you should be leaving out are the following:

1. Media Players – you don’t want the music/video to stop playing when you lock the screen

2. Browser – you don’t want the browser to close the page you are seeing, trust me.

3. Gmail, Twitter – for receiving notifications

Underclock your processor using SetCPU (rooted phones only)

SetCPU is an application which can be used to manage your processor. Most of the time, you will not be needing to use your processor completely. In that case, you may underclock it to lower rates. You can also create profiles to clock your processor automatically based on conditions. SetCPU requires root access and you must have rooted your phone in order for it to work.

To get started, you can create the following to save battery:

• Phone locked – Minimum clock speed
• Battery 80% – 75 percent clock speed
• Battery 50% – 50 percent clock speed
• Battery critical – Minimum clock speed

Please note that the left hand side shows the condition and the right hand side shows the effect. You have to create such profiles manually by yourself in the SetCPU application.

Use Tasker to create battery profiles

Tasker is another application you will be creating profiles. Tasker costs $6.99, but it’s tremendously powerful and is totally worth it.  In fact, its all about creating profiles. The app basically works on conditions and does assigned tasks when certain conditions are satisfied.

Check out Lifehacker’s post on creating tasker profiles and get a basic idea of the application.

Then, create the following profiles (or similar):

• Time 1:00 AM to 7:00 AM – Airplane Mode
• Location: Home or Hostel Room – Brightness 30 per cent
• Sync settings for specific apps – 30 Minutes to 2 Hours

Play around and suddenly you will have a lot of profiles all optimizing your battery life.

Get JuiceDefender

JuiceDefender is another battery management app and it is perhaps the best one out there. It is free and also has a pro version which provides more features. It automatically manages your network mode, Wi-Fi, location services, controls internet access for specific apps and also performs scheduling.

There are several preset modes available by default and it should be more than enough for normal users. However, if you do want to explore, JuiceDefender is very customizable.

Now, these tips might be a lot in number but if you do manage to implement and try out all of them, you will be able to see the difference. The best way to see the results is using a widget called BatteryWidget which predicts battery life stats based on the activity your phone has seen.

If you have a tip of your own, please do share it with us. Android phones suck when it comes to battery life and it is up to us to share tweaks and ideas to make things better.