Friday, July 28, 2017

Battery life: WLAN, mobile data and apps - tips for Android and iOS

The limits of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets usually lie with the maximum battery life. With only a few drawbacks to the functions and simple setup modifications, you can save a lot of energy and greatly increase the runtime of your iOS or Android device. First of all, it makes no sense to turn off all modern smartphone features just to save power. Then you could immediately retire your Android device or your iPhone and get your old Nokia 6210 back out of the drawer.


Calibrating the auto brightness of devices with iOS 6


Smartphones will be the only thing that you are, but GPS, WLAN, 3G, 4G and LTE as well as Bluetooth will cost you a lot of juice. You extend the runtime of your devices immensely when you shut down the services as soon as you do not need them.


Manually darken the display of Android devices


Look at it like this: At home, the TV, the lighting or the radio probably also turn off when nobody is at home. This should be handled exactly the same way with your smartphone. Disable GPS if you do not need a location, turn off Wi-Fi if you are not accessing WiFi networks while you are away, and disable mobile data services at home when you are on the network anyway. Also, Bluetooth does not need to be turned on when it is not in use. With these simple measures, you can extend the runtime of your smartphone or tablet quite considerably.


Turn on the rotation of the screen only when needed


For Android phones, there are numerous apps that turn on and off the services in wind ropes. With the iPhone up to and including iOS 6.1.3 was sometimes quite tedious, one had to always change the device settings. From iOS 7 there is a control center, which is opened with a wip from the bottom edge of the picture. All changes can then be carried out in a single step.


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Both Android and iOS devices have automatic brightness control. This also works quite well under normal circumstances and also helps to save energy. However, there are also exceptions to this rule. If you have an iPhone or iPad with iOS 6, the auto brightness may not work properly.


This is annoying, but fortunately quite easy to correct by calibrating the car brightness. To do this, go to a dark room without a light source, deactivate the brightness of the car by pressing "Settings / Brightness and Background" and drag the slider to the left. Now activate the auto brightness briefly and deactivate it again. Go to daylight or into a bright room with a light source and keep the front of the iPhone, where the light sensors are located, towards the light source. Set the screen brightness to the maximum value to the right, and activate the auto brightness.


For Android devices, the automatic brightness control is already active at the factory. Thus, the brightness of the display automatically adjusts itself to the environment using the light sensors on the front of the devices. However, automatic regulation is not always optimal. If you are in a dark place, the display is often set much brighter than necessary.


In this case, remove the "Automatic brightness" checkbox in the system settings and manually reduce the brightness as far as possible. The more you darken the display, the more power you save.


By the way, the automatic brightness depends on the battery state. The more full the battery, the brighter the display. So if you want to save energy right from the start, the best way to adjust the brightness of the display even when the battery is full is by hand.


Modern smartphones have a motion sensor that monitors the position of the device and automatically rotates the displayed contents as the position changes. The sensor runs continuously in the background and needs electricity. In many cases the use of the sensor is of course useful, for example, if you are viewing images that have been partly taken in cross-section and partially in the portrait format. Especially Smartphones are used in the normal everyday use but usually in the Hochformat, therefore it is necessary to disable the motion sensor.


For iOS 6, click the Home button twice and drag the multifunction bar to the right until a button with a round arrow appears on the far left. Click this to disable the autorotation.


For iOS 7, the button is part of the control center. The button is located to the far right of the middle row of five and also contains an arrow that describes a round. Some Android smartphones have hardware buttons that turn off auto-rotation. Alternatively, you can use an app like "AutoRotation Control" or "Set Orientation", or disable the Auto Rotation in Settings / Display Settings when the command is available. In Android 4.x, you can easily change the setting using the AUTO TURN icon in the status bar. However, this switch did not work with our testtable.


Even if you have a data volume with ample volumes and do not really have to save on the amount of data you are using, you should prefer to go to the Internet via Wi-Fi and deactivate the mobile data transfer. The reason: the mobile data transmission consumes much more power than WLAN, because a stronger signal has to be sent for the contact with a far-away radio signal. A WLAN antenna, on the other hand, is normally in the vicinity, so that the strength of the send signal is automatically adjusted and thus lower. For the same reason, you should be as close to the WLAN access point as possible if you really need to save energy.


Better use of WLAN than mobile web access


You know this for sure: from a certain app are often two versions offered. One that is completely free and funded through advertising messages and a second, free advertising that you can buy for a few euros. It is, of course, tempting to save money and rather to download the free version to the device - if you want to test the app, there is no objection.


However, if you find that you use the app more often, you should think about buying the ad-free variant. On the one hand, the advertising messages naturally cause higher data consumption, which is at the expense of their inclusive volume. On the other hand, the apps need stream to download the messages. With a single app may not matter much, but several can be installed can reduce the run time of the device drastically.


Avoid apps with built-in messages


You may also know apps that regularly send more or less useful messages to your smartphone or tablet, for example, if someone is totally unknown to a Nobel Prize in physics or because it could rain in the next 24 hours in your residential area. The news itself is at least energy technically no problem, but that the app is constantly running in the background and the servers regularly polls for new messages. In Android versions 4.1 or later, the "Settings / Apps" notifications can be disabled.


Scroll right to "All", click all apps in order, and uncheck "Show notifications." For iOS, go to "Messaging" on "Messaging" and then on the "Apps" listed below. Select the "None" icon in "Note Style" and deactivate the menu item "Show to Message Center" (iOS7) or "In Head Office" (iOS6). And most importantly, the first time you start an app, you are often asked if the app is allowed to send you push messages. As a rule, you can quietly "reject" the question, which saves bandwidth, data volume and, of course, also electricity.


As practical as an automatic data synchronization of apps in the background may be, turn it off for all non-vital apps. Instead, try to synchronize manually, preferably when you have a fast wireless network nearby. The problem with automatic synchronization is that a regular Internet connection is searched for when the default synchronization time has come. The process consumes power, even when the app is already up-to-date and there is really nothing to synchronize.


Turn off notifications from apps


Turn off auto-sync of apps


Android live backgrounds can be power guzzlers


Dark backgrounds help save energy


The mobile live backgrounds on Android devices are very popular for good reason. It just looks beautiful when gentle waves move in the background or the leaves flutter in the wind. Whether and how much current the mobile background consumes is different from case to case and depends on the care of the programming. It may well be that a live background consumes almost no additional power, while another that looks similar can be a true power-eater. Here's just one thing: try it out!


This tip applies only to devices with OLED or AMOLED displays, because here black pixels need no energy. So if you want to save energy, you should choose a black background or at least set a dark theme. As a result, the runtime of the device can be extended quite easily.

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