The
humble Android phone. Brilliant, aren’t they? A veritable Swiss
army knife of a device with GPS, mp3 playback, video playback to
double up as a mini TV, internet access in your pocket, game machine
– the list truly goes on. In fact, far better than the iPhone which
just appears to tread water in comparison to the cutting edge Android
phones that are available (The Galaxy S2 had a dual core processor
before the iPhone 4/4S ever did). People won’t look at you and think you're a
pretentious cockwomble either, which is an added bonus. Anyway, I do
digress.
But -
they’re cursed with poor battery life.
Manufacturers
seem to cram all sorts of features into their phones, but they don’t
appear to be making much progress in battery technology. As little as
4 years back, a phone only needed a couple of charges a week; even my
Blackberry Bold 9700 could make 2.5-3 days absolutely hammering it
(which I sometimes miss, especially for battery life).
However,
all is not lost. Read on, and discover how you can get by as best as
you can:
Spare
batteries:
Carrying
an emergency or spare battery sounds like a pain, but you will have
the last laugh versus Mr or Miss Fancy Pants with their iPhone who
can’t change their battery. After market or genuine ones are
available from the usual sources, even better if you buy a
special charger that charges the spare cell independently of the
phone – so that you have one in your phone while the knackered
battery is on charge. They’re usually a universal battery cell
charger that can charge camera batteries, with movable pins to cater
for many different types. Or a phone dock that can be left near your
desktop PC that can be linked to your USB socket for syncing, that
can charge a spare battery and the phone at the same time.
Extended
batteries do exist that are double the power, in the case of the
Galaxy S2 you can buy a 3500mAh (normal capacity is 1650mAh) that has
a thicker base back to take the larger battery cell which doesn’t
add too much bulk due to the larger screen and general size. They
exist for other Android models, and can stretch your battery life
to every other day, or last an entire day if you went stupid with it
and had full brightness, GPS, Video, Gaming, and everything but the
kitchen sink running at once.
(Normal battery and extended battery comparison pics: Narrower is 1650mAh stock battery. thicker is the 3500mAh extended. Charge time: 3hrs for 1650mAh, 4hrs for 3500mAh. Width is only increased by just over by approximately half a centimetre or so. Actually feels better to handle and not as cumbersome as you would think)
Don’t
do top up charges:
This
is a blanket rule that covers ALL mobile phones. Far too many people
do top up charges, which can make things worse. Where I work, there
are 100+ mobile phones, ranging from Blackberry, boring common garden
Nokia’s, a few boring Samsung B2100 ‘tough phones’, and one or
two iPhone’s. A common problem is many of the sales and engineering
staff bringing them back complaining that the battery life is
poor. This has been resolved by letting the phone run down to the
point where it shuts down entirely, and then giving it a full and
decent charge overnight – 9 times out of 10 the phone has then
behaved perfectly.
The
culprit is 'top up charging', especially with charging
the phone using a car kit. These devices are never as reliable as
sticking the phone on the house mains to charge up, and people are
usually only in their cars for an hour or two and they feel a
needless compulsion to charge it up – when the battery life has
been pretty much fine and can make the rest of the day; the original
intention was to be used as a ‘just in case’ charger. Lithium Ion
power cells are supposed to be able to deal with top up charges, and
don’t have the ‘memory effect’ problem associated with Ni-Cad
(Nickel Cadnium) that required the cell to be discharged of power
before recharging (as seen in older taped based Camcorders). In my
experience, the newer Lithium Ion cells do have problems occasionally
and benefit greatly from running down to nothing and giving a good
old charge.
In
short, try running it down to nothing and give it a good belt of
‘lekky’.
PART TWO: EXTENDING EXISTING BATTERY LIFE
(*the latter is on Android 2.3.5 and above for Samsung TouchWiz. Phones may vary slightly)
(Power saving menu, showing 'System Power Saving' which slows processor speed. Has the effect of making the phone less smoother in operation but extends battery life significantly)
Power Savings and APN
Widget:
This is a very
effective desktop widget that gives a quick 'at a glance' panel to
switch various functions off without delving deep into the menu
system of the phone.
The 'desktop widget'
gives the ability to knock off certain functions, or turn them down
to minimal settings: Wi-fi on/off, brightness, screen lit time, Bluetooth, GPS, and lastly Sync that gives you synchronisation to the
Google server for email, Twitter, and Facebook notifications. If you
have Android 2.3.5 you will also have the option of 'system power
saving' (below the 'Sync' tab, click to enter) that will slow down
the processor speed of the phone (making menu functions and screen
swaps slightly jerky on an S2, but no adverse effects were noticed on the
Galaxy Note which has a quicker processor). I have found this to
really make the phone last out despite compromising the smoothness of
operation slightly, it is well worth the trade off if you switch it
into this during work hours when you shouldn't really be using it.
The biggest killers of
battery life I have noticed so far are GPS tagging of Tweets/Facebook
and Google+ stati, or for using GPS for sat-nav purposes and
direction finding. Followed by excessive screen brightness (which can
be turned right down if you're in a building, or left on 'Auto'
brightness), leaving Bluetooth on needlessly, and leaving 3G/HSPDA
enabled for internet access. It is also worth installing an APN
widget that severs data connection, which may sound like defeating
the object of a smart phone but when you're just using the phone for
mainly texting and making calls (like a mobile phone should be),
then 3G/HPSDA isn't needed to conduct a phone call or text. I have
even had a double capacity battery (usually intended to last two
days) expire in slightly under a day when I 'geo-tagged' a load of
tweets while going on holiday.
(Settings menu, showing the 'sync interval' - this can be altered so that it asks for information less often and save battery life)
During work days and
hours, I choose to mainly have data connections off using the APN
widget and enabling it when I need to check Twitter or other form of
internet usage and switching it off once done. This also has the
effect of reducing how much data your phone is 'eating' all the time
which can also save money, as many people have data caps on their
bill which can easily run up excessive data charges. When I go home,
the APN is off and I choose to fish all the data the phone needs via
Wi-Fi; which is quicker in my case with having a fibre optic
broadband collection and 802.1n wireless access which is infinitely
quicker than the 3G/HSPDA on my phone. It is also worth checking the
settings of applications like Twitter and Facebook for how often they
report back for information, having the phone ask for information far
too often can reduce battery life further and is worth having a play
around with as an experiment.
Don't put all your eggs
in one basket:
It's all very well
having a phone that doubles up as a TV, tunes player, sat nav, and
God knows whatever else. People arrogantly assume that their device
must do everything exceptionally well, but to be honest I feel a
smart phone is a jack of all trades and a master of none, they're all
just a phone and the rest of the gubbins are a bonus. Smart phones
are pretty damn awesome pieces of technology (especially with the
dual core processor models like the HTC Sensation and Galaxy S2), but
when you have it playing your music back, camera, tweeting this and
that, video playback and so on it is obvious to see that something is
going to give, in the quest for multi functionality and minimalism.
Which is obviously going to have a large effect on your battery life.
All these smart phones as far as I'm concerned, have got a long way
to go to be a multi purpose device where you can leave a load of
things at home and take a magical one solution device, the battery
life just isn't up to it.
Are you a keen
photographer? Then carry a camera around that will always be far
superior than a phone
Like listening to load
of music and watching films? Stick with a purpose built mp3 or mp4
player like an Archos, Cowon, or (if you really have to) an iPod/iPod
Touch.
It makes common sense
when you think about it. Also, if your phone breaks you have lost
your mp3 player, camera, and sat nav if you rely solely on it for
every single thing.
A phone is a primary
communication tool that can dig you out of a load of trouble.
Imagine the problems you would have if you just took only the phone in
your weekend bag - performing all of the above tasks and
ran out of power in an emergency situation, or worse still lost the handset and got lost in a foreign town? At least if you kept your phone to mostly
being a phone, then you wouldn't be up shit creek without a paddle.
After all, you wouldn't go applying a hacksaw to your TV and DVD combo in your bedroom just to improve the DVD player. Use a separate DVD player and TV!
Custom ROM (for the
brave and/or super geeky):
Finally, the last
resort here is for the BRAVE amongst us. Installing a Custom ROM on a
phone is a lot like 'jailbreaking' an iPhone (but Google aren't
really arsed about you doing it). The process is called 'rooting',
where you unlock all the phones functionality from the factory
settings giving you the power as 'root user' where you can do
whatever the hell you wanted to it.
Custom features are
often built in that normally the phone wouldn't be able to do, such
as overclocking/underclocking of the processor (like a desktop PC) to
make the phone work quicker than what it was intended to do, or work
slower to improve battery life and a whole bunch of other features
too long to list. The most famous example is Cyanogen,
who have highly specialised programming teams making Custom ROMs for
many Android handsets (visit the Cyanogen website, and watch some
YouTube videos to see examples of their work in action). These have
the benefit of ridding the phone of various crappy programmes or user
interfaces that are slapped onto certain phones (such as HTC Sense,
or the TouchWiz interface seen on Samsung branded Android handsets).
The main bonus of a
Custom ROM is also to breathe life into an old phone and run a newer
and more improved version of Android. One example I have seen is the
original Galaxy S which on earlier models only left the factory with Éclair (Android 2.1) running Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0),
Samsung argue blind that this phone is not capable of doing such a
thing, but there is outstanding evidence that proves otherwise.
Obviously down to the fact that will make some people think twice
about buying a Galaxy Nexus S when they can customise it themselves
to run the latest version of Android (installing a Custom ROM can invalidate your warranty, so don't blame me if you turn your handset into an expensive paperweight).
So, that pretty much
covers it, Those tips should pretty much cover most Android phone
users.
Lastly, here's a screen
grab of Juice Plotter showing a normal days use. The usage entails 30
mins of listening to music via a set of Bluetooth A2DP earphones (Sony Ericsson HBH-DS205's which also double up as a hands free mic, a snip at £19 on eBay) when I commute
to work, 30-45 mins of calls after 1900hrs, and around 20 text
messages, and some internet usage during work hours. The yellow parts
of the graph denote internet, text and phone usage while the red
curve shows returning home and having the phone access and
synchronise online via Wi-Fi. You will also notice that the battery
barely falls when inactive (during the curves that are only coloured
green). This is on the stock 1650mAh battery, and the 3500mAh that I
own effectively doubles the life of this (which I shall post for a
future blog).
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