We’ve all been there: That moment when you realize your phone is about to die and there is no charger to be found. It’s safe to say we all die a little inside when we hear that shut off tone. I’m glad to tell you all hope is not lost! There are little things you can do to conserve some Android battery life.
“Leave Wi-Fi ALONE!”
As long as you keep it on, anywhere you go it is going to be looking for a signal. This is draining to your phone and uses up a lot of power. Switch your Wi-Fi off when you know you’re not going to be needing it.
Put It Down
Put down your phone. That’s right. Believe it or not the easiest way to maintain an “acceptable” battery level is to grab your phone, take that pretty little hand of yours, move it towards a desk/counter/etc and put it down. Take a break from selfies, texting and social media. Most of the time we’re on our phones because we’re bored or because it’s become a default move the second our mind isn’t occupied with something. You’re sucking up better that could be used for more important matters. Learn to ween yourself off the smartphone. It will be better for your phone and for those around you; in-person interaction is fun!
Spring Cleaning
We all do it: You download that cool new app, use it for a week, then forget about it. It gets lost in your phone until you find it 6 moths later, go “oh yeah, forgot I had that” and move on. To stop this begin a “spring cleaning” routine with your phone, but instead of it being every spring do it every month. Most apps nowadays do automatic updates and all kinds of actions that keeps them running in the background without you ever even noticing. This is obviously terrible for you battery usage, so minimize your chances of this happening by decreasing the amount of apps on your phone. Lets be real, you don’t really need all 50 of those apps you have on there.
Phones need A Bedtime Too
A lot of newer phones feature automation tools that allow you to turn off your mobile signal and Wi-Fi after a certain time. Having this routine with your phone will help save a lot of power. If your phone does not have these features, you can install a management app like Tasker and turn off all non-essentials overnight. A lot of people also put their phones on airplane mode. This also eliminates being woken up by buzzes and lights going off on your phone.
One more sleep feature you can adjust is how long your phone waits while it’s inactive before switching off. It’s usually set to 30 seconds, but setting it to the quickest time will save you more battery.
Know Your Phone
If you go into your settings then pick the “battery” option it will will show you what is sucking up the most battery. There are also pas like Battery Doctor that also give you an indication of what is eating up your battery life.
Join The Dark Side
Turn down the brightness of your phone because it’s the display that can use up the most power. You can put a brightness toggle widget on your home screen so you have fast and easy access to brighten or dim your phone. this way you only use max brightness when absolutely necessary. Using a darker wallpaper will also help. There are two main types of smartphone displays: LCD and AMOLED. LCD uses a backlighting system that illuminates every pixel. AMOLED displays, however, have pixels that are individually lit; a pixel that turns into a color is lit, and thus, uses power. A pixel that remains black, is not lit and doesn’t use any power.
No Need To Feel The Moves
There is no need to feel a pump or grind every time you press a key. We all use our phones enough to where we’ll know what we’re doing without feeling a vibration. Those little moves are called hepatic feedback… Turn it off. You’re using up power every single time you press a key and have to feel the bump. To turn this off you go to your settings-sound & notification-other sounds-Turn off the “vibrate on touch” feature, the “dial pad tones”, “screen locking” sounds and the “touch sounds”.
Chill Out
Batteries work better in cooler conditions. Try keeping it in cooler places: a purse will be much cooler than your tight pocket. Simple little things like this help the efficiency of your battery.
Recalculate your GPS Usage
There are solo many apps right now that use location. Check your apps and you might see that most of them are using your GPS. If you don’t frequently use these apps, the best thing to do will be to turn off your GPS until you actually need it.
Built In Life Saver
Android loves you so they built a battery saver mode into your phone. Turning this on when your running on low battery will be a life saver. On some phones you can set that mode to automatically turn on when you’re running low.
