7 APPROACHES TO QUIT MURDERING YOUR ANDROID BATTERY

There are few things that destroy your Android's battery more than anything else, and most of them are common to all devices, not just a specific smartphone. If you're suffering from a tired smartphone after half a day then take a seat, pull out your notebooks and pay attention!

Seriously, look after your battery the best you can! © ETFY

Display brightness

No surprises here (at least I hope there's not!): your device's screen is the biggest juice sucker there is. And the higher the brightness setting the worse the problem. Auto-brightness may sound appealing, but it pumps the brightness up erratically and frequently, making the screen sucker problem even worse. Set your display brightness to as low a setting as is comfortable for you and raise it only when necessary. You'll be surprised how low a setting you can get away with and how big a difference it will make.

Auto-brightness is not your friend! Limit that sucker's output! © ETFY

Location, Location, Location

Unless you're a bike courier or pizza delivery driver, there's probably no real need to have Location Reporting on all day and night, and even less need to have GPS enabled simply so you can pinpoint your location at your work desk or in your lounge room. Turning off GPS makes a huge difference to your battery life and keeping Google's Location Services off when you don't need them helps too. Get yourself a widget or shortcut and just turn them on when you actually need them. It takes 5 seconds and saves you tons of battery life.

Keep Location off unless you need or use the battery saving mode, and keep GPS off. © ETFY

Display timeout for the count

Display timeout – the amount of time it takes your screen to go to sleep after you stop navigating – is a huge factor when it comes to battery life. Regardless of how much you use your phone, if you have your display timeout set to 2 minutes, just imagine how much better your battery life would be if you set it to 1 minute, or 30 seconds, or even 15 seconds! Considering that screen illumination is the biggest battery killer, letting it suck your battery's life away when you're no longer even using it makes no sense at all.

Get into your Sleep/Screen Timeout settings: set it to as short a time as you can live with. © ETFY

Account syncing

Having every account under the sun set to auto sync is a massive waste of battery, especially considering you could have thirty or more accounts pinging the internet every hour for updates you're not going to read. Go through your device settings and only enable the accounts you really need to be updated instantly on, like Gmail, for example. Do you really need Twitter to sync every fifteen minutes, or just when you launch the app? Google apps are particularly guilty of endless syncing, so manage those, and then set your other apps to manually update when you launch them.

That's a whole lot of unnecessary syncing going on, and that's just Google apps! © ETFY

Wi-Fi settings

Wi-Fi, where would we be without it? With a longer lasting battery, that's where. But no one is going to ditch Wi-Fi just for an extra hour or two of battery life, so the next best thing is to avoid unnecessary battery waste when it comes to your wireless connections. Hit your advanced Wi-Fi settings and set them to avoid poor connections and your Wi-Fi connection to stay always on during sleep (so you're not constantly disconnecting and reconnecting every time you turn your screen on). If you've got a Wi-Fi optimization option you should turn that on too.

Hit those Advanced Options and maximise your Wi-Fi efficiency. © ETFY

NFC, Gestures, Profiles etc

I love NFC, but the truth is I hardly ever use it. So keep that bad boy turned off unless you actually need it. Your phone is not an Oyster Card after all. Likewise gestures: unless you really use all that eye tracking, hand swiping, motion launching voodoo there's no need to have it all turned on so your sensors are always on the lookout. All these things may sound minor, and they are, but they all add up to more savings when it comes to your battery. And if you have access to Profiles, make use of them: when you're sleeping, when you're in a meeting, when you're at the movies etc. Plus, now we have all kinds of power saving modes on our devices, so why not make use of them!

NFC, Android Beam, gestures, eye tracking, motion launch, Bluetooth: all suck battery. © ETFY

Old and unused apps

I'm the first to admit, I have 300 apps on my phone, most of which I haven't opened in months. Some were one-off freebies that I can't bear to part with cos they saved me a whole 80 cents, but many more of them are just useless apps I never use anyway. Seriously, when was the last time you opened IMDB on your smartphone? So ditch the apps you don't ever use (you can always download them again if you need them) and make sure the apps you have are updated. New versions usually contain bug fixes and battery optimizations, so it's worth staying up to date.