Juice Up Your Battery Life!

If there’s a consistent complaint among most Android phones, it’s the battery life. Especially as the screens get larger and higher-resolution, the battery life continues to shrink (I’m looking at you, Droid Incredible!). While there are some options for higher capacity batteries on the market, I’m going to go over some ways you can extend the life of the battery you’ve got.

To discover where your battery issues lie, the first thing you need to do is see what’s eating up your battery. I recommend checking this after you’ve run your battery down most of the way on a normal day of use. To check your battery use, go to your Android Settings -> About Phone -> Battery Use. You should see a screen that looks something like mine. This screen will tell you how long your phone has been unplugged and what applications are using the most battery. Depending on how you use your phone, you can expect to see things like the Display and Phone calls toward the top of the list. If you have any installed applications using much more than 2-3% of your battery (depending on your usage), you might want to see if they have any settings that might reduce their impact. For example, setting a Twitter app to check for new messages every minute will use significantly more battery than setting it to check every 5-10 minutes. This also works in combination – if you have 10 apps that check for things every half hour, you’re probably hurting your battery life as well. If you have apps that you rarely use, but are taking up a lot of battery, it might be best to uninstall them. The good news is that once Android 2.2 becomes the mainstream version, it will open up the door for more “push notifications,” so apps won’t have to be running every few minutes to pull updates.

If your display is one of the biggest battery hogs, I recommend that you turn down your brightness, or at least set it to auto-brightness. Running your display at mid to high level brightness will eat a lot of battery. If you’re indoors most of the time, you can probably set your brightness to the minimum level and it will still be plenty bright for most situations. You can also use various settings widgets, like the Power Control widget that comes on most Android phones to quickly change your brightness. I use the Locale app’s brightness changer to automatically set my brightness to low when I’m at home/work, and auto otherwise.

If the first two options aren’t enough for you, you can always try JuiceDefender.  JuiceDefender (along with the paid upgrade UltimateJuice) allows you to have your phone turn off the data/wifi signals at regular intervals to save battery. Essentially you can set it to turn off your data, and then have it turn on for a minute or so every few minutes (or even less) to check for messages/updates/etc. It doesn’t turn off the phone radio, so you’ll still receive calls, but turning off data can be a big saver. JuiceDefender is very customizable, with settings based on time of day, screen status, and even data traffic.

The free app (JuiceDefender) gives you some basic options for disabling your data connection, but by purchasing Ultimate Juice, you get much more flexibility in your settings.  As you can see, I have my data enabled for 1 minute every 5 minutes, except when there’s constant data traffic, so it won’t interrupt anything downloading.  I make sure to enable data when my screen is on, and when I’m using the Navigation or Slacker Radio.

I’ve found a decent increase in my battery life since using JuiceDefender.  Depending on my usage, I can normally go about 12 hours on a charge (I’m a heavy Twitter user), and JuiceDefender has added 3-4 hours to that time.  If I’m not on my phone much, it’ll now go 2 full days between charges, over double what I got without it.  Since the screen is the biggest battery user, the less you use your device, the more effect JuiceDefender will give it.

JuiceDefender is free in the Android Market, while the upgrade UltimateJuice is €2.79 (approx $3.62).