How to Improve Battery Life on Android Phones

For a long time I used to have an old Nokia phone. It didn’t have any cool features, but I liked it a lot and didn’t want to replace it… until the day I saw the HTC Incredible S. First of all, I liked its appearance, then I started reading about Google’s Android OS and its advantages, and one day I decided to buy this phone. I was lucky enough to find it for quite an affordable price, so I went for it.

The HTC Incredible S is really a very stylish, I can even say a gorgeous smartphone, and Android brings in so many useful features my old phone didn’t have… But the problem is – I found out that Android phones have a really short battery life, or so it seemed to me. I could use my old Nokia for about a week before the battery was drained, and my new Incredible S’s battery lasted only for a day or even less. I was really surprised and started reading different forums to find out if the other Android users had the same problem. It came out that Android devices usually have a really short battery life – HTC Incredible S users said they could actively use their fully-charged devices for 6-9 hours – and that’s all.

6-9 hours couldn’t be enough for me, so I started looking for ways to improve the battery life of my Incredible S. It took me some time to find ways to save some battery life not depriving myself of the goodies Android offers. And here are my tips; I hope they’ll be useful for other Android users as well:

1. First of all, try to keep your phone’s software and apps up-to-date, download the new versions as soon as they appear, since they’re usually more optimized and consume less battery life.

2. Second, did you know that the air temperature and pressure affect your Android phone’s battery life? Keep in mind that your battery will be drained in a few hours if it’s too cold or hot around or if you take it with you to high mountains.

3. Third, services like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS consume battery life even if they’re just on but not being used at the moment. So if you want to improve your Android phone’s battery life, it’s better to keep these services off when you don’t need them.

4. Screen brightness also affects the battery life of Android phones – the brighter the screen the more power it consumes. So decrease the default brightness of your smartphone’s screen if you want to save battery life or turn auto-brightness on (if your phone has such an option; the HTC Incredible S has it) – the phone will make the screen darker when you’re indoors thus saving a considerable amount of battery life. You can also use darker static wallpapers instead of bright live ones – they also consume less power.

5. Sometimes when you close an app its process remains open and continues to drain your phone’s battery, that’s why it’s a good idea to always make sure that all needless processes and apps are closed. Android phones usually have built-in apps and task managers to deal with those apps and processes, but you can also use something like the Advanced Task Killer or any other similar app from Android Market.

6. And the last tip is to check emails, weather forecasts and other things like that manually, since data push services also consume much battery life.

If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to prolong your Android phone’s battery life up to 2-3 days. Maybe it’s not too much, but at least it’s much better than 6-9 hours, right?

This article is written by guest author Amelia Hunter who is a professional journalist and blogger who writes articles for http://www.rightmobilephone.co.uk/ – a phone comparison website offering the best HTC Incredible S deals at the moment. She’s also interested in movies, anime and PC games.