11 Tips to Boost Your Android Phone's Battery Life

Top-notch Android smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S5 $0.00 at Amazon and HTC One (M8) are powerful, but unfortunately, they don't have endless battery life. In fact, many Android phone users would be happy to make it through a single day, hoping that a nightly recharge is sufficient.

Sadly, it sometimes isn't. A number of factors have conspired to reduce gadget endurance over the past several years. Thinner designs with less room for batteries, larger and brighter screens, faster quad-core

processors, more software that runs in the background, and power-hungry GPS radios all share responsibility. The move from 3G to 4G networks a few years ago—particularly of the LTE variety—has also taken its toll.

But there's much more to poor battery life results than that. Fortunately, there's plenty you can do to stem the flow of juice from your Android device. To write this article, I used a Google Nexus 5 $465.90 at Amazon ,
as it's running the latest version of Android 4.4 KitKat with no extra interface enhancements, but these tips should apply across just about any Android phone. Try these tips to extend your handset's battery life:

1. See what's sucking the most
juice. Navigate to Settings > Battery to see
an organized breakdown of what's
consuming your phone's battery.
Applications and features will display in a
descending list of battery hogs. If you see
an application you barely use or a feature
you never use, you'll want to uninstall the
app or turn off the feature.

2. Reduce email, Twitter, and Facebook
polling. Set your various messaging apps to
"manual" for the polling or refresh
frequency, just as a test, and you'll instantly
extend your device's battery life by a
significant amount. Once you see what a
difference that makes, try re-enabling just
the most important ones, and possibly
reducing their polling frequency in the
process.

3. Turn unnecessary hardware radios off. It's
great that today's phones have LTE, NFC,
GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but do you really
need all five activated 24 hours per day?
Android keeps location-based apps resident
in the background, and the constant drain
on your battery will become noticeable, fast.
If your phone has a power control widget,
you can use it to quickly turn on/off GPS
(the largest power drain), NFC, Wi-
Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. On stock Android,
swipe down to bring up the Notification bar,
and then tap the icon on the top right
corner.

4. Use the extra power saving mode if you
have it. The aforementioned Galaxy S5 and
HTC One (M8) both have Ultra Power Saving
and Extreme Power Saving modes,
respectively, that limits the phone to texting,
phone calls, Web browsing, and Facebook.
This can squeeze extra hours or even a day
of standby time out of just a few remaining
percentage points of battery.

5. Trim apps running in the
background. From Settings > Apps, swipe to
the left; you'll see a list of apps that are
currently running. Tap on each one to see
what they're for; you can stop any apps that
you don't need running in the background
all of the time.

6. Dump unnecessary home screen widgets
and live wallpaper. Just because they're
sitting on the home screen, seemingly
inactive, doesn't mean they're not
consuming power. This goes for widgets
that poll status updates in the background,
as well as ones that just sit there but look
pretty and animated—not to mention
animated live wallpaper. (But don't dump
everything, as part of what makes Android
great are the home screen customizations;
just remove the ones you don't use.)

7. Turn down the brightness and turn off
Automatic Brightness. It's probably obvious
at this point, but you'll be surprised by how
much this one alone helps to improve
battery life.

8. Update your apps. Applications often get
updated to use less battery power, so you
should make sure your apps are up to date.
Even if you configured the phone for
automatic updates, some apps still require
that you manually install updates. Check for
app updates in Google Play by hitting the
menu key and going to My Apps.

9. Keep an eye on signal strength. If you're
in an area with poor cellular coverage, the
phone will work harder to latch onto a
strong-enough signal. This has an adverse
effect on battery life. There's not much you
can do about this one, but keep in mind that
this could be the culprit behind a seemingly
weak battery; it's worth popping the phone
into Airplane mode if you don't need data or
voice calls.

10. Check the reviews. We conduct battery
life tests on every single Android phone we
review. Unsurprisingly, the results vary
widely between handsets, even on the same
network. When choosing a phone, make sure
that real world talk time is sufficient. You
can't go by what the manufacturer says; we
see variances on the order of several hours
of usage in both directions on a regular
basis.

11. Buy a battery case or larger extended
battery. Battery cases combine a hardware
enclosure, which protects your phone, with
an extended battery that can double your
phone's endurance. You can find models
compatible with popular Android phones
from a variety of manufacturers, such as the
Mophie Juice Pack and Incipio Offgrid
Battery Backup Case (both for the Samsung
Galaxy S4).