Great Android battery saving tips

By Alex Angove

Last updated 01 August 2013

Do you need more power to get your smartphone through the day? Try these simple tips for helping your battery last longer.

Watch your widgets

It’s important to pick your widgets carefully. Many widgets, such as weather and news widgets, rely heavily on animations and regular live-updates pulled from the web, and both of these features drain battery. Having several such widgets across multiple home screens can seriously drain battery life. Make sure you only use what you find useful.

A lot of devices come with default widgets already taking up home screen space. If you find yourself not using these then remove them from the home screen.

Quick Settings

Quick Settings are the best way to manage battery usage on Android. These allow you very quick and easy manual control of various features, some of which are notorious battery hogs. You’ll be surprised at how much battery you can save by toggling some of these on and off.

Most phone manufacturers include a Quick Settings bar in the notification panel of the phone, and many allow this bar to be customized so that your most important and battery-draining settings are readily available.

Screen Brightness

Screen brightness should be one of the first things you adjust if you need to save battery. The Auto-brightness setting can be annoying with the way it changes depending on ambient light, so we suggest adjusting manually using Quick Settings. You’ll save a huge amount of battery by dropping that brightness down to half way, but see if you can go lower and still use the phone comfortably.

GPS

One of the biggest killers. Try to keep GPS off when you’re not using maps services. It’s not important for most phone functionality and you can still have workable location services with it disabled.

Bluetooth

Absolutely keep Bluetooth turned off unless you’re using it. Security reasons aside, it’s a huge battery drain and, for most of us, a fairly unused feature.

WiFi

Disabling WiFi isn’t hugely important, but if you’re not planning on using WiFi in the next few hours it can be useful to turn off. It won’t save a huge amount of power, but when you’re running low every bit helps.

Mobile Data

Disabling mobile data is a last resort for when you’re certain you’ll run out of juice before finding a charger. You will be astounded how much longer a phone can run without 3G and 4G switched on, even if you’re not using the internet. You will still be able to make phone calls and send/receive SMS with mobile data off. You will not be able to send/receive MMS, any internet-based messages like email or use GPS.

Battery Saving Mode

Many Quick Settings options also have a specific button to engage a battery saving mode, which work by adjusting settings like those above, based on specific parameters like how much battery is remaining.

These can be useful, but occasionally frustrating. We suggest you try handling things manually for a while. You know what features you’ll be needing for the rest of your day better than your phone does.