Friday, September 17, 2010

Extend battery life on Samsung Vibrant

Here are a few tips / tricks to extend the battery life on Samsung Vibrant and any Android based phones. Of course, cutting down on many of these aspects may reduce the quality of experience that you have with the phone, so there's always a give-and-take involved. However you can definitely turn-off those features that you don't use so that you can have the full-fledged experience of the phone as well as a better battery life!

1. Switch off GPS
If you are not using any location aware services, maps or navigation, then turn off the GPS radio. GPS radios generally use a lot of juice and if you are not using the feature, no point in letting it consume battery.

2. Switch off Wi-Fi
If you are on the move and not using Wi-Fi, then turn it off as Wi-Fi radios can eat up a lot of power as well.

3. Switch off Bluetooth
If you are not using Bluetooth, then turn it off. Switched on Bluetooth transciever that is not being used is another major culprit for draining the battery in all phones that have bluetooth, not just the Samsung Vibrant.

4. Adjust & Optimize Display Setting
Reduce the brightness of the screen and decrease the screen time-out (the amount of time the phone waits to turn the display off if there is no activity). Display is the major consumer of battery resources hence using it in a controlled manner will provide astonishing results.

5. Increase Synchronization intervals
Increase the gap between synchronization intervals or set them to synchronize on demand instead of a time interval. Apps for social networks, emails that use "polling" instead of "push", weather, news, etc. are major culprits for such unwarranted usage of battery.

6. Install Apps to Kill unwanted tasks
Note: this may be risky / complicated depending on which app(s) are installed and how they are used.
For Android 2.1, you can install JuiceDefender to intelligently manage & control how apps use battery.
You can also install & use Advanced Task Killer to kill apps that don't close after you have exited from them. Apps that keep running in the background even after you have exited from them can also drain the battery.

7. Remove Dynamic Wall Papers
Dynamic / Live Wall Papers and similar apps can also eat into the battery very fast - disable such apps to increase available battery.

8. Turn off Vibrate / Haptic Feedback
A small motor spins at a high speed to create the Vibration / Haptic Feedback buzz. This obviously takes a lot of power, so switching it off can save quite a bit.

9. Switch to Flight mode in areas of no cell coverage
Switch to Flight mode in areas where there is no cell coverage to conserve battery. When there is no cell coverage, generally the signal strength is boosted to see if any towers can be reached and the polling interval also increases. Switching to Flight mode switches off the radios saving the battery from drain out.


Note: These are also generally applicable for all other (smart) phones too based on whether they have the below mentioned features.

2 comments:

harnish said...

that's working thanks

Yield Wars said...

Great reading your bloog post

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