Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Improve Your Android’s Battery Life

We all know how useful smartphones are, especially when you’re in a pinch and need to access the Internet. However, you can’t take advantage of any of these sweet features if your battery dies out within four hours of a full charge. This might be an extreme case, but the point stands that there’s a ton of stuff draining your battery when you don’t want it to.

According to CNet, there are several ways you can cut down on the amount of battery life that’s wasted throughout the day. Most of them involve disabling certain features that are innately made available on mobile devices.

Disable Unused GPS-Based Services
By default, your phone has its GPS enabled. As you can imagine, all of the communication between satellites, cell phone towers, and the phone’s GPS chip put a ton of strain on your device’s battery. However, some of these GPS-based services aren’t really required for you to enjoy all of the benefits of a smartphone. These two, according to CNet, are Location reporting and Location history. These settings use your phone’s GPS alongside other Google applications to enhance your user experience, but they aren’t really necessary. Disable them by going to Settings > Location > Google Location Reporting.

Make Sure WiFi-Scanning Is Turned Off
You might use WiFi in the office or at home, but what about when you’re out and about, on the open road? Most of the hot spots you encounter in public won’t be safe for you to connect to reliably, so it’s best to turn off auto-connecting to WiFi on your device. However, even when you’re not connected to WiFi, your device will search for connections unless you tell it not to. You can make sure this setting is off by following WiFi settings > Advanced. If the WiFi scanning box is unchecked, you’re all set.

Control Your Data Sync
You might notice how your Android smartphone is constantly syncing to your Google account. This is a good sign that you’re keeping the files on your phone backed up online and ready to go in the event you lose data. However, this also means that your phone’s battery is draining due to it constantly syncing to the Google account. Instead of turning off the sync for all of your accounts, you can limit what syncs and what doesn’t. Do this by heading to Settings > Accounts. Select the account to access the sync settings. You can then uncheck any items you don’t want synced, or turn it off completely if you want.

These are only three ways out of many to limit how much battery life your Android device consumes. For more tips on how to stay productive and efficient with your technology, give us a call at (703) 359-9211.