Snapdragon Battery Guru helps squeeze more juice from your Android

Although Qualcomm already does the impossible to make its Snapdragon SoCs energy-efficient, the chip maker went the extra mile and put together a 'battery efficiener' for you to try out. It's called Snapdragon Battery Guru, and is available for free in Google Play. It runs on all Snapdragon-powered devices and does a number of battery-extending tricks that we'll get to know more about right now.

The main operation is based around Qualcomm's behaviour-learning engine monitoring which apps you use the most, which apps connect most often to the Internet to refresh content, how often your phone stays idle, and how much you stay connected to data and Wi-Fi. That's quite a few parameters, which explains why Battery Guru runs as a resident service in the background of your phone. The main philosophy is that, in addition to the screen, the apps you have installed form a significant battery drain as many of them refresh and pull data from the Internet on an automated schedule, not taking into account the toll on battery life.

Since it learns by usage patterns, Battery Guru won't start working right off the bat. But give it a few days of solid apps usage, and it's going to automatically alter their refresh schedules. Thus, some of them will start pulling data only when you open them, saving charge, while others will refresh as often as they need.

In addition, mr. Battery Guru offers a widget with toggles for Wi-Fi, data, sync, and brightness level. That's quite the useless feature, considering you get the same controls in the convenient notification drawer. But some of you could appreciate it.

Has anyone used Qualcomm's app before? If you have any impressions, feel free to share them in the comments.