Well, it is a “break” from the previous content of this site, nevertheless I want to share this. Being a bit fed up with short battery-cycles of my smart phone, I was searching for ways to prolongue the stand-by time. And it does work out!
In my case “cell standby” and “display” are the two major energy consuming elements. This of course depends on how frequently (and what for) you use your phone. Nevertheless: these two are a good target if you want to get more time out of one charge. And following three steps address them fairly well!
- For the display there’s this great little Dimmer app, that toggles the brightness to 10% (which is lower than the phone-settings let you go) with one touch and back to “normal” (whatever you specify -especially neat if that is “automatic adjustment” on your phone) with a second. Placing it on your home-screen you can easily reduce brightness and save power.
- The second big thing is getting the “cell standby” reduced. This can be achieved by simply turning off all of the phone’s unnecessary (data-)communication. Here it’s up to you how far you accept to go in order to save energy. One thing is to disable the “background communication” which turns off the automatic synching of apps -if you can live with that.
- Going another step you can turn off any data-communication and even go from 3G to 2G networks. The problme with the last two: these settings are “deep” in the system (4 clicks and 1 scroll)… But, don’t fret. There’s a handy shortcut :) It comes by the name 2G-3G OnOff and is really just a (one-click) shortcut to the settings-page where you dis-/enable 2G/3G and data-communication.
The “down side” of disabling data (via step III) is that you have to wait some 5 – 10 seconds before you can use internet after turning data on again. If this is acceptable to you, you can benefit from greatly increased battery lifetime. I came from a bit over a day to 3,5 days with moderate use of the internet and normal phone/sms behaviour -basically the same behaivour as prior to step III.
If you do rely on data-communication: there are other apps out there that allow for automatic switching of this setting. So you could have the phone without communication for half an hour, 3minutes on (so it can synch) and then half an hour off again – which probably will do the trick as well. I have to admit: I didn’t try that. Above solution works good enough for me ;)
Finally, just to be on the safe side, you can install the Watchdog app. This will alert you if an application is using more than a specified trashhold of your CPU-ressources. Besides it is a nice way to kill apps fast (e.g. in case your keyboard crashes and you want to restart SMS & keyboard).
Attribution of image:
The image used is from xioubin low, dirtibuted under the CC-License. See the original here.