Android Battery Saving 101

Making your Android device get through the day can sometimes be a struggle with tiny batteries, fast processors,  huge data consumption and of course the fact that you never want to put it down. There are, however, ways of keeping your phone going that little bit longer. Here, I will show you a few clever tricks and tips to aid you in getting your phone through the day without compromising too much.

Battery monitoring tools

Built into Android is a great ‘Battery use’ tool. If you hit menu > settings > About phone > Battery usage you’ll see a graph with a list of items ranging from ‘display’ to any of your installed applications. This is a great starting point to finding any rogue apps using lots of battery power/CPU cycles.

Let’s start off with the battery saving basics.

Disable Sync

Android sync is the way Android stores and backs up your data to the cloud. All of your contacts, emails and calendar events are synced, in real time, to Google’s servers so you don’t have to worry about ever losing any of your data. This can, however, lead to your battery being consumed a little more than you might think.

Disabling sync is simple.

Tap menu > settings > Accounts and sync > and untick ‘Background data’. This will stop applications from sending and receiving data to and from Google’s servers and will also stop applications like Facebook and WhatsApp from receiving data, thus, saving a few minutes to a few hours of battery life.

Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/GPS

Having Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS enabled isn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor is it always a battery waster. You never really know when you’re going to need to take a call whilst driving or need the ability to navigate to an unknown destination.

GPS

There are times though when apps such as Gowalla, Foursquare and Facebook may want to know your location and will consume a hefty amount of battery life, especially if you’re going to be checking in a few times a day. Such applications don’t require you to use GPS and can triangulate your position based on your mobile network.

To disable GPS, press menu > settings > Location and security > untick ‘Use GPS satellites’.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is notorious for being a battery hog and whilst it may have its uses, do you really need it enabled all of the time?

To disable Bluetooth, hit menu > settings > Wireless and network > Bluetooth settings > untick ‘Bluetooth’.

 
Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is only available where there’s a hotspot. Keeping Wi-Fi turned on all the time in hopes to find an open hotspot is a sure way to drain your battery life. Unless you’re using a Wi-Fi hotspot right this second, keep it turned off until you know you’re going to be using a hotspot.

To disable Wi-Fi press menu > settings > Wireless and network  > Wi-Fi settings > untick ‘Wi-Fi’.

Live wallpaper

Making your phone look pretty can sometimes come at a great price. Live wallpapers can be a resource hog without you really realising it. Sticking with a static image wallpaper will avoid such a thing from happening.

Google Latitude.

If you’ve noticed a significant drain with your battery life since upgrading your Google Maps and signing into Google Latitude, you may have found your culprit. Some users find a significant drop (over an hour) in battery life when using Latitude.

To disable Google Latitude, open Google Maps > press menu > Latitude > menu again > settings > ‘Sign out of Latitude’. Sure, you’ll lose out on being able to see where you and your phone have been but having a longer battery is more important, right?

Third party applications

Application developers are able to dig deep into Androids core and provide you with significant battery savings using various techniques.

Screen Filter (+ brightness settings)

One of the major battery killers is screen brightness. I don’t care if you have the latest AMOLED display, it’s still the biggest power draw on your device. First up, disable auto brightness. Hit menu > settings > Display > Brightness > toggle the screen brightness to suit your surroundings. More often than not, auto screen brightness will provide either too much light or not enough light for your surroundings. If you’re indoors, reduce your brightness significantly to improve battery life.

To improve battery life even more, you can make your display even duller by using an application called ‘Screen Filter’. Screen Filter applies a shade that acts as a dimmer to ensure your display becomes more dim. This also comes in handy at night to make reading your display a little less straining on your eyes. Screen Filter is free.

Green Power Free

Green Power Free automatically toggles your data/Wi-Fi on and off depending on user configured settings. You can disable data/Wi-Fi when your screen is off and your phone is in your pocket, enable data every X minutes to retrieve emails, enable data/Wi-Fi when the screen is turned on and unlocked. There are quite a few options in the free version, with the premium version having additional features. There are several other applications which do the same thing, for example, Juice Defender. I find that Green Power Free does things much better, faster and far easier than Juice Defender does, without the bulk.

NoBars Battery Saver

This application basically says what it does in the title. NoBars will save your battery whenever you don’t have any mobile service by enabling airplane mode for you, automatically. If you’re in a low signal area for a long period of time, your battery will drain due to your mobile radio turning up the power level whilst searching for a signal.  There are options for ‘signal search timeout’ and ‘airplane mode timeout’ in order for the phone to disable airplane mode in order to search for a signal again after X minutes. This is especially useful if you travel a lot, be it on a train or underground.

Watchdog Task Manager Lite

You don’t need a task killer. Fact. This is a myth. You may, however, want to keep an eye on background apps to be sure they don’t lose control and eat up CPU cycles. Watchdog will monitor your apps and alert you if one should consume more CPU cycles than it should. Whenever an app starts to use too many CPU cycles, Watchdog will alert you so you can either keep an eye on that app or kill it. Killing a misbehaving app is smarter than killing all of your apps as killing apps blindly can cause them to stop working as designed.

For Root users

SetCPU

Overclocking and underclocking your phone is great. Improve performance or save battery life. Perfect, no? SetCPU allows you to set up user defined profiles to manage your CPU speeds under specific conditions. When your phone is asleep, you don’t need it running the CPU at a high clock rate. SetCPU allows you to keep your CPU from clocking up high and reducing battery life. SetCPU has many features, including the ability to see how long your CPU has been used at a specific clock speed.

Tegrak Overclock Ultimate

Primarily for the Samsung Galaxy S family of phones, Tegrak will overclock, underclock, overvolt, undervolt and supercharge your phone. The key feature of this app for this post it the ability to undervolt the CPU. Undervolting can lead to extended battery life and a cooler phone without affecting the phones performance.

Custom ROM/Kernel

ROM/Kernel chefs often design their ROMs/Kernels around better battery life whilst keeping performance peppy.  You can find a list of custom ROMs and Kernels at the XDA Developers Forums.

Automation – Tasker/Llama

Tasker and Llama are great ways of automating tasks on Android. Turning things on and off based on a variety of settings (like location). For battery life, this can be a great thing. You can use Tasker/Llama to periodically sync, change certain settings based on battery life, turn features on and off, set certain applications to be able to use certain hardware functions (i.e. GPS). The list can indeed be endless.

Last but by no means least

Keeping a spare battery in your bag. One of the really good things about almost all Android phones is the ability to swap batteries. There are third party manufacturers who make high capacity spare batteries. Some of these companies claim that they can hold a higher charge than they actually do, be very wary of this when purchasing a high capacity battery as you may not actually receive a longer lasting battery.

Questions/Comments/More tips? Leave them below.