Whilst Android had the one up on iOS for a while with its multitasking ability with user applications it did come with a few drawbacks one of which was an impact to battery life. This can occur when you leave applications running without quitting them or when an application has a background service component that runs without any visible indication on screen.
A service, for those of you who don’t know, is something that runs in the background performing specific activities without requiring input from the user. On a Windows computer, a common service is the “Windows Search” service that indexes your files in order to speed up searches you may execute within the desktop environment. Similarly, on Android, you will have services that are part of the operating system but you will also have services that provide ongoing functionality to graphical applications.
A few examples as shown below are WINAMP, Skype and Vlingo. You can get to this screen through “Settings” then “Applications” then “Running Services”.
Android Background Services
By themselves, these services should not impact your battery life too much so long as they remain dormant and refrain from actively processing anything. However, if you have recently installed a new application you might want to check in here and see if there is anything that looks new. Optionally, you can stop a service by tapping on it and then see if your battery life improves however a better option might be to completely remove the application so as to remove any chance of the service starting up by itself. Using a process of elimination you should be able to work out the culprit and then work from there to determine if there are some application settings that will be more energy conservative.
To further assist in your investigation, you can review battery statistics under “Settings” then “About Phone” then “Battery Use” as shown below.
Android Battery Statistics
At the end of the day, it can be a bit of a dark art trying to get the most from the battery in your mobile device but I’ll cover some other tips and tricks to help you get further over the coming week.
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