=====================================================================================================

Smartphone Battery Woes

=====================================================================================================



Apple, BlackBerry, Samsung and other global brands have launched smartphones such as the iPhone 5 vs IPhone 4s equipped with powerful operating systems such as Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian, Apple’s iOS. Such devices allow users to engage in many different kinds of activities including surfing the web, streaming video, playing games, listening to mp3s, shooting photos and capturing hi-def video. Given this range of diverse capability and multi-functionality, it’s no wonder that battery life has always been a concern for developers, manufacturers as well as users. On average, most smartphone batteries last little more than a day before being completely depleted, and in need of a recharge. Check out the iPhone 5 competition.



​Keeping Batteries on Their Toes.

Regardless of the specific smartphone you have, the weakest link is likely its battery. Treating your battery with respect will not only extend the life and usefulness of your new phone, but also boost its resale value—just in case you decide to dump to back on the market prematurely.

​

You might be wondering why you should even bother about battery level when you have a charger with you at home while you sleep. The truth is that repeated charging for certain kind of batteries eats up battery chargeability. For such batteries, the best way is to conserve as much as you can so that your battery retains its original capacity as much as possible.



Battery life can be effectively utilized and managed, leaving nothing to go to waste. Here are 9 great ways to conserve your smartphone’s battery.



Bluetooth & Wi-Fi. One of the biggest energy drains on smartphones occurs whenever they search for things: e.g. signals, Wi-Fi, 3G or Bluetooth, etc. When the reception is poor, the phone will continue scanning for a good connection. Repeated searches for these signals can easily take a notch out of your battery level. Turn off Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth when not needed. One convenient way to do it is to switch to ‘Airplane Mode’ or just switch your phone off when you know you can’t get any signal. When you need good reception, locate yourself in high connectivity zones. This will prevent your smartphones from constantly seeking for a connection and wasting your precious battery power switching from one signal to the other.



Dim That Screen. Screen brightness affects battery life dramatically. Dimming your screen will reduce your smartphone’s power consumption. If our screen is brightly lit up every couple of minutes when we check our emails and such, it eventually will zap battery juice. Lower the levels on auto-brightness settings. Doing this may do wonders to your battery life in the long run.



Shorten Screen Timeout. On the same topic, if you wish to minimize the power consumption of your smartphone by the screen display, consider shortening the screen timeout. Keeping the timeout duration short will ensure that the phone doesn’t waste power when you’re not using it.



Charge Your Battery Correctly. There are generally two kinds of rechargeable batteries commonly used for smartphones: Lithium-ion (Li-Ion), and Nickel-based batteries: Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) and Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd). Battery capacity in NiCd batteries is reduced every time you recharge. However, NiCd batteries have longer life cycles i.e. they can be recharged more often than NiMH batteries before stop working. Nickel-based batteries should only be charged when they’re more or less out of power, and not when there’s still a good amount of energy left. Be sure to charge completely.



Li-Ion batteries have the longest life cycle among the three types of batteries but they also need to be charged more frequently (even when the battery is not fully used up) to maintain original capacity. Find out more about the type of battery that your smartphone uses and maintain the appropriate charging strategy for optimum usage.



Disable GPS. Many apps eat battery juice for breakfast, lunch and dinner, particularly those which utilize GPS to track location. Your smartphone's GPS unit allows sending and receiving of signals to and from satellites to determine your exact location, which is integral for the correct functioning of some apps: e.g. map-based apps like Google Maps or to check-in on Facebook. When left running in the background, these apps continue to send and receive signals, zapping your battery almost continuously. Identify and close those apps when you really don’t need them. A more extreme way is to disable location services when prompted by these apps. It may slow down the efficiency of these apps - preventing tracking of your location;  some users deliberately do that for privacy reasons.



Close Unnecessary Apps. Some of us open app after app and don’t bother to close them, even after we no longer need to use them. This multi-tasking capability is a common feature of smartphones, but it is also a main reason why battery life gets drained away easily. In these cases, you’re losing battery juice not even using anything. Leaving apps open will drain battery power in no time. Kill apps you're not using. Use an app to manage the multitasking ability of your smartphone: e.g. Android app called Advanced Task Killer.



Reduce Notifications. With constant connectivity to the Internet, we tend to get notifications on our smartphones all the time, be it updates on the latest news, emails, high scores from games, add-ons for apps etc. Every incoming notification uses power: lighting up your screen, make a sound alert or vibration. Save batty power by reducing notifications to only prioritized functions such as new texts or other messages.



Turn Off Vibrations. On the topic of notification, vibrations are great for notifying you, particularly in places where it’s necessary to keep the phone silent. Vibrations use up more power than ringtones. If you don’t think they're necessary, disable vibrations or at the very least, lessen the magnitude of the vibrations.

And Finally…. Switching Off When Inactive. Although it is true that turning on your phone consumes more power than unlocking your phone, switching it off for a couple of hours can save more battery than leaving it on sleep or inactive mode. If you know you’re not going to touch your phone for an extended period of time, such as when you’re attending a meeting or sleeping, you can actually cut down a significant amount of energy consumption if you simply switch it off.



Energy Hogs & Bugs: Apps That Eat Your Smartphone Battery For Breakfast.



If you've always had a uphill climb with battery life on your smartphone, even to the extent of carrying extra batteries, this next section is for you. 



There are some obvious culprits to the problem of early battery exhaustion: Apps that use GPS, programs that constantly update and free games that have scrolling advertisements are battery killers. Recently a program has been developed that helps figure out what apps are zapping your phone; it is a free program called Carat, which identifies energy hogs (apps that use more energy than a typical app) and energy bugs on your individual device. An energy bug is an app that uses far more energy on a particular device than on most other devices.



Once Carat identifies hogs and bugs, it offers recommendations to help improve battery life. Typical energy hog apps include email and  Facebook, and killing these programs when not in use is recommended for saving battery life. Beware of apps that run in the background, even when not in use: e.g. like Yahoo news and music apps. Once you identify what’s devouring your battery power, the solution is simple: If you don’t use it, lose it. The same goes for GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Turn these off when you don’t need them.

For things like Email, Facebook and Twitter, check out your settings. Email is probably the easiest example.  Go in and see how often email is checked:  every one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, once and hour? Makig these type of changes on settings will cut down rather substantially on battery usage. It’s really a matter of prioritizing.



Keep that battery running strong.