I’ve had a great time using and playing around with the Android devices from Verizon Wireless, getting familiar with their usual hardware structure and software setup.
Not only have I noticed how to get the most out of the powerful Android platform, I’ve learned how to manage the battery life.? Battery life on a cell phone is almost equivalent to the graphics card in any good computer.? It serves as the bottle neck and if you can strive for the biggest and best battery life, you may have a phone to keep for quite some time.
The best way to see where your phone power is going is to check out Android’s built in battery usage screen.? Go into the settings >> about phone >> battery and identify which things are taking the most of your battery.? The most common are applications, the browser or the screen itself.
One of the biggest offenders is the display or back light which can be turned down.? Most people do not realize how easy it is to adjust to a much more toned down back light which can save them a huge amount of percentage points on their battery.? Simply go into settings >> display >> brightness and either choose to have it automatically change or just set it at one of the lower display points manually.? You’d be surprised how easy it is to function when your phone is even at the lowest display.? You also have built in widgets for your home screens to turn the brightness of the phone up or down.
The biggest killers of battery on any phone is the WiFi and the Bluetooth- if you are no longer using it, turn it off.? There’s no work around here or any settings to modify, it’s simply on or off, the latter bringing you a much bigger battery life.
Apps.? They are the biggest battery killer.? When using your applications, be sure to go through settings and uncheck things that run in the background or update constantly.? Applications like sports score fetchers or Twitter or Facebook constantly update in the background of your phone.? Email that is not native to the phone (pretty much anything but Gmail) is also something that will take a lot of juice depending on the frequency you have it at refreshing.
Remember, you can always use the task manager of the phone to kill any unwanted apps.? I normally uninstall anything I am not using on the phone so it keeps my space free and my resources untied up.? I even turn off the GPS location when not in use.
If you can handle some of these practices and keep your battery out of direct sunlight (it sounds crazy but its a great way to kill a battery) you might just have one of the best battery lives you’ve ever noticed with your powerful Android device.
