The amount we use our smart phones these days is insane. On any given day, my phone’s juice lasts only about six hours, and I own a fairly high-end one.
I’ve tried carrying a portable charger around, not to mention the phone’s charging cable; but as they say, prevention is better than cure. Here are a few apps that can help you save some battery life for when you really need it.
Normal
Normal is an iPhone-specific battery diagnostic app that tells you which apps on your phone are doing a number on your battery life. Not just that, it tells you which apps you can reconfigure so that they use less battery. It also informs you about the settings on a generally low-energy-consuming app which make it consume more energy than it should.
Battery Doctor
The app tells you what’s draining your battery, informs you how long your battery will last in certain situations (over the WiFi, calls, graphic-heavy games, etc.), regulates power consumption, helps you avoid under-charging, reminds you not to over-charge and includes a task killer that lets you set power-saving modes.
Green Power
The app focuses on just managing your data connectivity, be it through your service provider’s data pack, Bluetooth, GPS or WiFi. Most of us use WiFi almost all the time (guilty, your honour), and while that is great for utilising the various capabilities and smarts of our phones, it’s not so good for the battery. Green Power, however, toggles the data network and the WiFi on and off depending on the need. You can set time-out values for usage, and the app does the rest – it’s fully automatic.
Tasker
While most apps focus on saving your battery life and killing unnecessary apps/tasks, this app takes you beyond all that and lets you automate most of your phone’s regular functions. You can adjust settings for how your phone handles connections, texts, calls, media, and all of that based on location, time of day and events. Pretty handy for those of us who don’t have a lot of time to spare configuring our phones.
Juice Defender
The app is great at power management: it performs almost all the functions of the other apps on this list. My favourite feature, however, is that the app offers customisable profiles for saving battery life. There are about five preset profiles (including the default version), and with a single tap you can utilise whichever functions of your phone you need at that point of time.
