Improvements to battery life haven’t kept up with the increasingly power hungry features of modern Android phones.
Phones are now thinner (less room for large batteries), screens have got larger and brighter, processors have become dual-core (even quad-core) powerhouses and GPS usage is the norm.
All these features conspire to suck batteries dry – often lasting less than a day before needing a juice infusion.
You can extend battery life by turning hardware features off if you are not using them – do you really need GPS, wifi and Bluetooth running 24/7? Decreasing the display brightness and killing off processes can also help.
But it takes time to keep switching these things back on and to manage power settings – if you have better things to do (or are lazy like me), try letting an app do the hard work for you. The following apps (in no particular order) can either automatically manage settings to prolong battery life, or report on what steps you can take to stop your battery draining so quickly – some have extra features beyond power management.
1. Juice Defender Battery Saver – Easy to use power manager app to extend the battery life of your Android device. Juice Defender automatically manages the most battery draining components, like 3G/4G connectivity, WiFi and CPU speed.
5 preset modes and mobile data/wifi toggle automation and full activity log.
Rated – 4.5 stars
Cost – Free (paid Plus and Ultimate versions available with extra features)
2. Easy Battery Saver – Saves your battery by intelligently dealing with phone’s network connectivity, screen time out and screen brightness. 3 preset modes and advanced customized mode. Sleep schedule setting to save battery life when you are sleeping.
Rated – 4.6 stars
Cost – Free
3. Android Booster – This is by the makers of the popular NQ Mobile Security app. It is more of an optimizer to increase speed, reclaim memory and monitor data usage but it can also help save battery power.
Includes an app manager to monitor apps in real time, task killer and battery power monitor to show which apps use the most power.
Rated – 4.5 stars
Cost – Free
4. Android Assistant – Like Android Booster, this is a full optimizing toolkit with management tools to optimize Android phones and save battery life.
Also included is a process manager to kill unnecessary apps, a cache/system cleaner and settings to save battery life plus many more features.
Rated – 4.5 stars
Cost – Free
5. Carat – This is the newest app and perhaps the most interesting because it can let you see how your own app usage compares to other groups of users. Unlike the others, it doesn’t do anything immediately.
After observing your use of the device for “about a week” it will start to generate reports just for you, even predicting the improvements you will see as shown in an example below:
Carat is a research project at UC Berkeley and aims to detect energy ‘bugs’ – app behavior that is consuming energy unnecessarily – using data collected from a community of mobile devices.
In other words, it occasionally takes measurements and sends them to their backend servers in the cloud. By collecting snippets of non-personal data from a large number of devices, Carat does not need to run continuously in the background.
Carat has become a victim of its own sudden success – initially the personalized reports were promised in a couple of days but due to the launch publicity (100-500K installs since launch) there are significant delays of a week – or longer.
Reviews for the app are therefore very mixed – some have given low scores because they expected instant results and others didn’t RTFM – you need to open Carat every few days so it can send data back to the cloud servers.
Rated – 3.4 stars
Cost – Free
Further details are available at the Carat website.
Conclusion
It’s easier to manage power and extend battery life of Android phones using an app than it is to manually configure power settings throughout the day.
The first two apps are classic power managers whilst the next two offer a lot more besides – with correspondingly more to go wrong… Unless you want to use the optimization features they may be overkill for battery saving.
The last app is an interesting concept but it’s difficult to recommend until the backend is able to cope with demand and results are received in days rather than weeks.
