What is Eating Your Android Battery

I recently returned home for Christmas to complaints from my mother that her Android handset, the Galaxy S, wouldn't even last the day. Now she's far from being a tech savy woman so i knew that heavy surfing wasn't the cause of her battery woes. So I went through a few things on her handset to see why her handset wasn't lasting the day when she barely made a phone call and certainly didn't answer any of my text messages.

The first thing I did to track down what was going on her phone was to do a bit of sleuthing, I simply checked out what is eating the battery?

1. Head to the "About phone" section of your main system settings

2. Select "Battery use" - There, you'll see exactly what apps have what used what percentage of your power since your phone was last plugged in.

It's normal to see system processes like "Display," "Phone idle," "Cell standby," and "Android system" in the list. What you want to look out for are third-party applications that consistently rank high. Certain live wallpapers, for example, may drain more battery power than you're willing to lose. Some GPS-heavy utilities can also have this effect. And virus-scanning software can bog down your system and chip away at your Pavilion dv5000 Batterylife hour after hour.

3. If third party apps are eating away at your battery life you might to disable them or uninstall them if you don't think you need them.

The second thing that I went to look at, was after I knew what apps were eating power was I checked out how often are your apps syncing? Tap into the settings of apps that require Internet connectivity and check to see how frequently they're refreshing. Many news apps -- including the "News & Weather" widget that comes preloaded on many phones -- may be syncing in the background and draining your phone's resources. If you don't need the autosync, disable it.

Third on my list is Dim your screen! Big, bright screens are nice to look at -- but they come with a big price when it comes to 6820s Batterylife. To shift to a dimmer way of life, click into the "Display" section of your phone's settings and tap the "Brightness" option. Try selecting the "Automatic brightness" first; it'll allow your phone to adjust its display level based on the lighting conditions wherever you are.

My fourth tip for getting the most out of your ThinkPad T42P Batterylife is to set your applications to refresh manually which means that they only go to get information when I ask for it. If you like having them check in on their own, consider at least raising the interval so they don't connect quite as often. Instead of refreshing every 15 minutes, for example, try setting them to do it every half-hour. Even that small of a change will cut the apps' background processing in half, saving precious power that'll add up to extra minutes of phone usage.

My final tip is to turn your GPS off unless you actually need it. It's a huge drain on your system and though it helps improve accuracy it only takes a second when you jump into Google Maps to turn it on and in the long run it will save your battery to ensure you're able to reach your destination.