Leading on from yesterday’s article, sometimes you need to be a real power miser if you are nowhere near a power socket or you have forgotten your charger. I’m sure many of us have undergone the humiliating scrounge around the office begging for a charger. Worse still, there are people that will simply help themselves to your charger when you aren’t at your desk – the nerve!
Desperate times call for desperate measures so one of the more obvious things to do is to turn off all of the unused radios in the phone. By radios, I mean anything that will send or receive a signal wirelessly. Commonly, these include:
- the cellular radio (2G/3G) and optionally GPRS/HSPA data connections,
- Wi-Fi,
- Bluetooth,
- GPS.
If you are in an area of marginal coverage you can expect your battery life to suffer as the cellular radios need to expend more energy generating a more powerful signal to communicate with the cell tower. Also, if you leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled on your device it will check for networks and paired devices in order to establish a connection. Meanwhile, background data connections that are left active whilst not using the device also contributes to battery drain.
Given the above, it makes sense to turn off the stuff you aren’t using but of course it introduces the relative inconvenience of having to turn these things back on when you actually want to use them. I guess if you are really desperate you won’t mind doing it as a one off but for those really looking to get the most out of their battery there is a better solution.
There’s a great app called SuperPower on the Android Market which will automatically manage all of these radios except the GPS which you will still need to manage yourself. The app is highly configurable with options to configure what happens when the screen is turned off, falling back to 2G and even scheduled times when you typically don’t expect to use the phone (like when you are asleep).
I must mention that this app is still in beta so you should bear in mind that there may be bugs that could stop your phone responding or coming out of customised low power modes. If you don’t like that idea I suggest you don’t install the app until it reaches a final release. If you’re feeling game, check it out as it might help you get through the day!
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