PCWorld - For all of their power and versatility,
smartphones--even the best of them--are cursed with abysmal battery life. Unless you use your phone very sparingly (and who does that?), you're lucky to make it home at the end of the day with enough juice left in the battery for one more call. But with the right apps and a little insight, you can double your smartphone's battery life--and work (and play) longer than ever before.
Though some phones live a little longer than others on a single charge, all smartphones suffer from the same basic problem: They do too much. Any 3.7-volt battery small enough to fit into your phone's tiny chassis stands no chance of lasting multiple days under a steady workload of running apps, browsing the Web, sending e-mail, and doing whatever else phones are expected to do. (Oh yeah, making calls.)
The author's HTC Thunderbolt is lucky to survive an entire business day on one charge. But with the tricks in this article, he manages to get home at night with a little juice left in the battery.Most smartphone batteries today are rated at around 5 watt-hours, meaning that they can deliver a constant charge of 1 watt to the device over a period of 5 hours. If your phone actually uses 1 watt per hour, and you pull it off the charger at 7:00 a.m., you can expect it to be dead by lunchtime. So the key to increasing your phone's battery life is to reduce the amount of power the handset uses per hour.
One obvious way to reduce your phone's energy draw is to use it less (yeah, right). A more practical approach is to manage the phone's power consumption by turning off unneeded features and turning down adjustable features. Turning off your phone's radios when you're not using them, reducing the screen's brightness, and killing apps that run in the background are among the tricks that can help your phone's battery last longer. They and other tricks and apps will help extend your phone's overall workday by reducing its moment-to-moment energy requirements.
1. Dim the Screen
You love your smartphone's large, colorful display, but it's the battery's mortal enemy. More than any other component of your phone, the display consumes battery life at a devastating pace. Most phones include an auto-brightness feature that automatically adjusts the screen's brightness to suit ambient lighting levels and system activity. This mode uses less power than constantly running your screen at full brightness would, of course, but you'll get even better results by turning your screen's brightness down to the lowest setting that you can tolerate and leaving it there. Even if you do nothing else suggested in this guide, following this one tip will extend the life of your battery dramatically.
2. Keep the Screen Timeout Short
Under your phone's display settings menu, you should find an option labeled 'Screen Timeout' or something similar. This setting controls how long your phone's screen stays lit after receiving input, such as a tap. Every second counts here, so set your timeout to the shortest available time. On most Android phones, the minimum is 15 seconds. If your screen timeout is currently set to 2 minutes, consider reducing that figure to 30 seconds or less.
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