Does Your Android Phone Battery Last All Day?

Battery life on 4G LTE Android phones is deteriorating.

 

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The idea of having a smart phone which holds a charge for several days of normal usage is starting to look like something from the past. The poor performance of batteries has been a growing problem, especially 4G LTE phones, such as HTC Thunderbolt of last year. It seems that things have gotten worse of the past year which does seem to correspond to the introduction of 4G LTE by Verizon here in the US which has been followed by AT&T. Much of the reported problems seem to be associated with that introduction. But the problems can be considered to be much bigger than that.

Smart phones have continually gotten more complicated with bigger screens and features which all by themselves is going consume battery life. There are some key items to be aware of which could impact your smart phone life and here are a few of them.

Wireless Carrier Connection
For your smart phone to be of much value, it must have an always on connection so that you can receive phone calls, SMS text messages and communicate with the Internet. While that is necessary, there are potential battery drain problems if your phone is struggling to find a connection. When one is traveling in areas that have less than excellent coverage you can expect you smart phone to be working overtime trying to find a usable wireless connection. That activity is going to put a drain on your phone. That situation has existed for years and is nothing new other than the 4G LTE connections. Those are not wide spread and can cause your battery to drain much faster as the phone tries to find a 4G LTE connection. That assumes you own a 4G LTE capable smart phone. If you have a 4G LTE phone and are in an area that does not have the coverage, turn over the 4G LTE capabilities.

WiFi Connection
With the growing smart phone market of the past few years, the issue of data usage has prompted wireless carriers to create tiered data plans to attempt to restrict the extremes of a few. One solution which has been created is for your smart phone to switch between your wireless carrier and a WiFi connection if one is available. That offloads the data access from the wireless carrier to a local WiFi device. If you smart phone can use a WiFi connection, it will continually look for a WiFi connection. That takes power from the battery to perform that search. If you are moving about, it will be having to look more frequently for WiFi access points as you leave the one that your smart phone had found. If you do not need WiFi, turn it off.

4G LTE
The new 4G LTE phones are themselves a battery draining item. The vast majority of these phones have a radio chip which has been essentially glued on the top of your existing radio chip and as a result will consume more power in its activities. That situation looks like it will be resolved as new phones entering the marketplace now have the 4G LTE chip embedded into the processor and therefore are far more efficient. For those of you who already own a 4G LTE phone, you are not going to get any relief in this area. If you are in an area where there is no 4G LTE connectivity, turn it off.

Bluetooth
Another source of battery drain is your bluetooth connection. That is generally due to your phone having to scan for bluetooth devices and then try and make a connection with those devices. While the battery consumption of bluetooth is probably very small, when you add it up with everything else, it may be another of the items to turn off to conserve your battery life. So, if you do not need bluetooth, turn it off.

Apps
It seems that the apps that you download are a potential source of problems with battery drain. That is especially true of "free apps" which quite often consume power trying to figure out where you are located so they can then display appropriate advertising. We already know that games consume a lot of power and can be associated with the intense graphic performance needs.

GPS apps are a huge battery drain such as those that perform mapping functions. A review by Engadget of the Galaxy Nexus and Google Navigation had the phone draining faster than the car charger could charge it back up. As with any app, some are going to consume your battery faster than others.

Social Media
One of the biggest consumers of battery life can be attributed to Social Media. The check in apps, such as Foursquare, can be a big drain on battery life. The biggest reason for this is that they are continually checking for updates, much in the same way that your smart phone checks for mail and other items. You get enough of these kinds of items doing that and they add up. You should probably check those that perform periodic updates from the Internet and increase the frequency they do that so it is less often. That will help your battery life.

Solutions
Solutions for these are many and this is only a list of some of the ones that can drain your battery. Listening to music is another one that can drain your battery. In terms of tools you might use, there are a number of them out in the market to try. As an example, CurveFish has a number of apps which can help you identify your problem areas and then turn them on and off as needed. There are many other companies out there who offer similar solutions.

Whether 2012 is going to be the year where we finally get a minimum of 24 hours battery life out of 4G LTE phones under everyday usages is an unknown as there are a number of factors to improve battery life. One is the OS which can improve how things use up the battery and Ice Cream Sandwich is reportedly helping in that area. Unfortunately, the roll out is very slow for Android 4.0. You might see much improved batteries coming out this year which by themselves could give us a few days of battery life. For now, the solution is to just put in larger batteries into smart phones.

Hopefully, you have other solutions than listed here and can share them.