How To Improve Your Android's Battery Life

In the words of Google co-founder Larry Page, "if you are not getting a day [of Android battery] there is something wrong." There must be "something wrong" with a lot of our phones, so hence the How-To Geek's practical guide.

The website has created a comprehensive tutorial on how to hack, fiddle and twiddle with the settings of an Android phone, to get the best out of the meager battery life. It's long, but accompanied with large photos explaining every step of the way.

Some of the steps involve downloading apps, but most are to do with disabling life-sucking apps and functions. It might make your usage slightly leaner, but at least you'll be able to get to work and back each day without having to take a charger with you.

Avoid anything that recommends using a task-killer to save battery in Android. Nothing can be further from the truth, and it's a shame that "help" articles continue to push this counter-productive myth. 

It's quite simple: disable widgets, live backgrounds, and constant polling updates and your battery will suddenly last a helluva lot longer.

But.
Don't.
Use.
Task Killers.

Period.

Why? When Android phones are idle, they lower their clockrates as low as possible to support the tasks that are running.
But when you kill a task, here's what happens:
1. You kill an idle task that's using very few clock cycles.
2. Android restarts that task using the maximum processor speed available.
3. Good job: you just wasted more battery by killing the idle task, because Android's just gonna restart it and use more power to do it.

Typically, people notice this and keep on killing tasks, only to see them restarted a couple minutes later. It's a sad cycle that is just wasting your time and speeding up the battery drain.

This isn't a flaw in Android. Android was designed to manage memory and processor speed without user input, and task-killers interfere with that and hurt battery life. The flaw are misinformed users thinking they know better than the electrical and software engineers who designed the system.