Battery life tips and tricks

While cell phones are getting bigger by the year and processors are getting smaller, it might look that one aspect of phones remains the same. You've guessed it right – it's the Li-Ion battery, the juice and pulp of your smartphone experience. Most portable gadgets use the Li-cobalt variety and - while it is similar to the previously used nickel-based architecture - it has some significant differences. With dual-core chipsets right around the corner and screen sizes increasing to 4.5 inches, battery life is all the more important. Check out our suffered tips and tricks to get the most of your battery!

Battery use on Android

• Screen brightness. It might sound obvious, but the brighter the screen - the faster you will see your battery dead. The easiest solution here would be using automatic brightness adjustment. But when you want to squeeze the most out of your phone's battery, manually tone down your brightness to the lowest level.
  
• Get a task manager. Android has it, iOS has something like it, and there are plenty of programs to do the job.
• Get rid of all those useless apps. Yes, we know how hard it is to fight one's iFart addiction, but keeping a few homescreens worth of apps means: a) push notifications could be using your CPU/battery, b) some of those apps might run in the background and drain your battery.
  
• Bluetooth - turn it off when you don't use it. If you really need to squeeze out the most of your phone think about switching off Wi-Fi and 3G/4G.
  
• Get a black wallpaper. Okay, maybe not for all phones, but some displays like the AMOLED one on the Samsung Galaxy S series tend to consume more energy showing white colors.
• Turn off apps like the music player when you finish using them. Sometimes we would leave music playing in the background, which would drain battery faster.
• Use the built-in OS tools to manage battery life. To access the one on Android go to Settings → About phone → Battery use.
  

Others

• Leaving your Li-ion-powered phone discharge completely often is not a good idea, since it puts stress on the battery.
• BUT you should let your phone fully discharge once every 30 charges. Reason - batteries which have a fuel gauge need to be calibrated and that is the perfect way to do it.
• Heat is THE major reason for reduced battery life. It is definitely not a good idea to leave your handset out in the sun (temperatures in your car's interior could reach up to 150 F), you would do better if you put it in a fridge!
• For longer idle periods store your battery at just below half charged, around 40 per cent. The remaining charge keeps the battery along with its protection circuit operational.
  
• Third-party batteries are tricky. Pick them carefully and doublecheck manufacturing dates.

Sprint's HTC EVO 4G

Will something change in the future?

Ever since we got a hold of Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, we started thinking that something has to change. The 1 GHz CPU clock rate paired with 4G radios trying to connect to the network along with a 4.3 inch supersized screen, were a bad combination when it comes to battery life. And now in anticipation of the newest dual-core chips like NVIDIA's Tegra 2 and with 4G networks rolling out on many networks in the near future, let's take a look at how will this affect your cell phone.

First of all, let's mention that the smaller the die, the lower the energy consumption. And even though productivity should be significantly higher on a dual-core chipset, battery life will hardly suffer due to the miniature 40 nm technology for Tegra 2 and expected 28 nm for the upcoming 4^th gen

source: Battery University