What Drains Your Battery?
So I think it goes without saying that using your phone drains the battery, but what specifically is draining the battery? There are two types of drain on a battery, passive and active (not official names, just what I call them).
Passive is also known as self-discharge and can vary depending on the chemistry (type) of the battery. This rate is how much a battery will discharge without being connected to anything and is usually given as a percentage of current capacity lost per month. On a side note, this is loosely tied to shelf-life of a battery and can effect what percentage of it's rated capacity you will get when taking a battery out of a new package. All batteries (rechargeable and single use) have some rate of self-discharge, although, some are worse than others self-discharging as much as 30% per month (e.g. going from 100% to less than 10% in 6 months). Other types have a very good (low) self-discharge rate at around 2-3%. Li-Ion batteries fall into the latter range and because of this, for this article, we can ignore passive drain.
The other type of drain from above is active and is caused by the battery doing some work. This could be lighting the back-light on a display, running your favorite game, or transmitting data to a cell tower so you can talk to someone that doesn't text :-P. Before you are able to reduce your usage, you must first, figure out what has the highest impact. Fortunately, most, if not all, Android phones come with some sort of battery management/log program. This will allow you to see the largest drains on the battery. Some phones may vary, but usually the easiest way to get to this program is to press the MENU (or the icon with multiple lines or squares) button and selecting Settings -> About Phone -> Battery. You should now see your current battery level.
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| Current Battery Level |
From here, you can click on "Battery Use" or in the case of the image above, click the battery picture. You should now be presented with something similar to this:
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| Summary of Usage |
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| Antenna/Non-CPU Item |
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| Application |
What Not to Do
Okay, now before I get into what you can do, let me first give some words of caution. There are a lot of "battery saving" apps on the market. Some will just kill (or close) all applications every so many minutes, others will turn off your data or sync to keep the phone from sending/receiving data. Turning off your data/sync is fine, but keep in mind that you will not get any automated notifications (e.g. texts, e-mails, etc.) while your data/sync is off. The apps that kill open applications can actually use more battery than if you weren't killing the applications.
When Android first came out, battery management wasn't a priority so apps would continue to run in the background, this would cause your phone to drain faster as the day went on. Starting with Android version 2.2, the priority of battery life was moved way up the list. Applications would close when they were done or at the very least would run in the background saving a lot of power consumption. When you have an app that kills all of the open applications, say every 30 minutes, you are actually causing most, if not all, of them to reinitialize and demand a lot of power while they do so. For this reason, it is now better to let them sit in the background and focus on battery saving using other methods. There is one exception to this, but I will get to that later.
Hints, Tips, and Tricks
Now onto the meat and potatoes of this article (yes, I'm a little hungry). So what can you actually do to help your battery life? Here are some quick points (mostly in order of effectiveness) to help with battery life.
- Turn off your screen - This is probably the easiest and most overlooked battery saver. If you aren't looking at your screen, it should be off. If you are always finding that you forget to turn it off after checking that quick text, you can adjust the timeout in your settings.
- Turn down your screen - If turning off your screen is the number one way to save your battery, this is by far the second best way. I understand that in full sun, anything less than full brightness is unreadable, but if all the lights are off, full dim should be plenty. If you don't want to mess with switching the brightness, you can always set it to auto (although this is less effective than manually changing the brightness). The easiest way to do this is with the power widget on your home screen.
- Turn off antennas - If you haven't used your Bluetooth headset in a week, why would you leave the Bluetooth antenna on the entire time? The four main antennas on your phone are Wi-Fi, Cell (which includes 3G/4G), Bluetooth, and GPS. If you aren't actively using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or GPS, turn it off. Remember that power widget I mentioned above, well it also controls the those three antennas. If you are going to be out of service for a while, just put your phone in airplane mode (press and hold the power button for the option) which will turn off all four at once. While turning off your Cell antenna will also help with battery life, typically this also takes the main function of your phone away. I only recommend doing this in bad reception areas (which by the way is a big drain on the battery due to the phone using max antenna power to find a signal) where you know you won't get signal anyway.
- Turn off 4G - This is similar to the point above, but should only be done when you are outside of a 4G covered area. This will obviously be less effective when the 4G antennas are made more power efficient and when the 4G coverage area grows, but for now, it's worth noting. There are apps that can help with this, or you can do a Google search to find the method for your specific phone. Some phones require a reboot for the setting to take effect (only when going from 4G to 3G but not the other way), but this should go away with updates.
- Turn off syncing - If you are going to be somewhere that you don't want to be disturbed (e.g. movie, meeting, etc.), why not turn off the data sync option on your phone (guess what...also on the power widget). This will keep your phone from auto-checking all of your linked accounts and notifying you as well as saving a little juice. This does not turn off phone calls and texts, so you might want to also put it into airplane mode if you want to block those as well. Quick note, don't forget to turn syncing back on or you will start to wonder why you haven't gotten a new e-mail in over 2 days (yes, I've been there).
- Be careful of certain apps - If you need your phone to last all day and you know you probably won't have a chance to charge it, don't use apps that drain your battery. GPS and Navigation are two big ones with the latter draining a fully charged battery in 4-5 hours (invest in a good car charger). The other big hit on the battery are games. These usually require your screen to be on and also will use quite a bit of processing to get those pretty little graphics. Videos are a also something to be cautious of.
- Run-away apps - Occasionally, you will notice that you phone is a little warm and it wasn't in the sun or in use. Typically this is caused by a hung program that will use almost all of your phone's CPU. This is the ONE exception to task killing apps. If you can't figure out what app is doing this, it's better to kill everything and let them re-initialize. This should only be a one-time deal, not an automatic thing. If you find yourself having to do this a lot, you might want to figure out what app is causing it and uninstall it. Not sure how to figure it out? Just look for an application in the battery usage summary that is using a lot of power but you aren't using actively. Music apps will cause false alarms with this method because they typically run in the background when playing music even if they aren't shown on the screen. You can minimize the chance of this one happening by rebooting your phone every once in a while.
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