Maximizing Battery Life on Android Smart Phones

We all love to hate our Android smart phones, there so convenient yet such battery hogs. Compared to our old dumb phones these smart phones, with their huge vibrant bright touch screen just suck batteries dry. Along with those bright screens, Android phones can run apps in the background and with all the data constantly updating, your phone is even draining when the screen is off; witch is the major culprit users don't think about. It's not just open apps in the background eating away at your battery life but the widgets Android has that you can put on your home screens; they just keep updating. So the more widgets you have the quicker the battery dies.

Now the easy way to fix this problem is to put a stop to your auto sync with Facebook and your Google account and delete all your widgets from your home screens. Of course this would greatly extend your battery life, but it would pretty much defeat the purpose on why you bought this expensive smart phone. It's extremely dumb not to be able to use a product to its full intended purpose, especially if it's because of battery life.

But what if you could shut off your data connections throughout the day when you don't need have things constantly updating throughout the day when you're not using your phone? Well that is exactly what an app called "Juice Defender" does for you which greatly extends your phones battery life.

What Juice Defender does is it can control different settings on your phone when you're not using them to help preserve battery life. It can control things such as data connection, and WiFi. The single best feature that saved battery life with this app is its schedule feature. How this works is it shuts off your data connection when your phone's screen is off. So whenever you are not using it the data connection is off, but once you turn the screen on and un-lock the device the data connection is automatically seamlessly turned on. But the best part is even if you do not un-lock your phone for awhile it still syncs and get email because it has scheduled on times. For instance my data connection is turned back on every 15 minutes for a total of two minutes to collect data then it shuts off again till either I turn the screen on you another 15 minutes goes by. The free version of Juice Defender just has this one time slot but the paid version gives you:

Enable data for 1 minute every 5 minutes

Enable data for 2 minutes every 15 minutes

Enable data for 3 minutes every 30 minutes

Enable data for 5 minutes every hour

Enable data for 8 minutes for every 2 hours

Additionally with the paid version you can have it shut off all data connection when your battery is low. I currently use "enable data for 2 minutes every 15 minutes" and I am seeing huge battery life improvements on my droid. The one drawback I see with this app is it will only save battery for users with a certain use pattern. If you constantly have your screen on all day this app will do little for you. But if you use it sporadically throughout the day it will work wonders for you.

A common concern for new users is that they will not be able to get calls or text until there phone turns on their data every 15 min etc but do not worry cause you will. This app turns off data connections not your cell connection so you will still receive calls and texts instantly. With that being said if you do use Google Voice for texting those texts are being sent through 3g if you are using the Google Voice app. But you can have Google Voice texts sent through your carrier if you do use this app, which is what I do. Juice Defender has lots of customization options so you can save the battery and use data to your liking. If you find your Droid dying midway through the day Juice Defender is definitely an app you should check out!