Saving your Phone Battery

The battery is the most important - and frustrating - part of your mobile phone. Here are some tips to keep your phone working during a power outage or a long time away from a wall plug. A blackout is a good chance to go cold turkey on some of the "features" that drain the battery quickly.

1. Turn off Bluetooth off. [Settings - Wireless and network - Bluetooth settings - uncheck Bluetooth]
2. Turn off GPS location services. [Settings - Location and Security - uncheck Use GPS satellites]
3. Turn off Wi-Fi communications. [Settings - Wireless and network - Wi-Fi Settings - uncheck Wi-Fi]
4. Turn off the 4G connection if your phone has that option - 4G is a power hog.
5. "Flight Mode" ("Airplane Mode") is very handy to toggle off all the radios for Bluetooth, GPS, and mobile connections. Press/hold the Power button and select Flight Mode from the popup menu is even faster.
6. You can get toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Brightness and Auto-sync by putting the Android "Control Widget" on your home page.
7. Keep your phone charging if a power outage is expected. If you have a spare battery (aren't you smart!), charge it too.
8. Most smartphones are set up for reading e-mail with messages being pushed down to your phone on a regular basis. You can save a lot of battery (and mobile charges) by turning off push notifications. [Menu - Settings - Accounts and Sync - uncheck Auto-sync]
9. Send text messages instead of calling. A text message send the information quickly and efficiently.
10. Take a holiday from online musuic, videos and games saves your battery.
11. Close applications that continue to run in the background. Close Android widgets that update on a regular basis (i.e. weather, news). With Flight Mode turned on, they won't update anyway.
12. Dimming the display and setting the timeout to the lowest setting (15 seconds) saves the most battery power. [Settings - Display - Brightness | Timeout]

Better Battery Life

Travelling with a laptop

Using WiFi Hotspots securely

Cleaning a Laptop