Maximizing battery life — the quest continues

While I have a few other blog posts in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion … under­stand­ing how to max­i­mize the bat­ter life seems to have taken on a life of its own. While I don’t have answers at the moment, I wanted to share what I had learned up till this point.

Get­ting Started

With­out get­ting overly tech­ni­cal, remem­ber that the Android rep­re­sents a small pow­er­ful com­puter in the palm of your hand. Every­thing that you do (Screen, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Wi-Fi) all need power. What isn’t as obvi­ous though is that the CPU (for all intents and pur­poses of this arti­cle, the brains of the com­puter) can place a drain on the bat­tery as well.

Why is this impor­tant? Well, the Android allows mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions to run at the same time. This means that while some­thing is “run­ning”, the CPU is being used — which in turn can act as a drain on the battery

Track­ing Down Those Back­ground Processes

Unfor­tu­nately, this next sec­tion might get a tad tech­ni­cal for some, but stick with me! Right now, I am try­ing to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what is run­ning on the back­ground — and ide­ally deter­mine what can (and can’t) be stopped.

So the next step was to find some tools that could help me iden­tify the list of tasks that were run­ning. While there are a num­ber of free tools avail­able, the one I have started look­ing at is called TasKiller(yes — it only has 1 K). To get it:

• Go to the Android Marketplace
• Do a search for TasKiller
• Down­load it (the appli­ca­tion is free)

If you run TasKiller, it will give you an indi­ca­tion of the num­ber of things that are loaded into your Androids mem­ory (which in the­ory could mean they are run­ning and/or putting a load on the CPU). For the record, TasKiller is fairly sim­ple to use — when you see the list of ele­ments, you sim­ply click on tasks to stop them from running.

Other Things I See

The Android also comes with a “Cor­po­rate Cal­en­dar” appli­ca­tion, which the vast major­ity of peo­ple are never going to use. I see this program/task get­ting loaded as well, and I haven’t quite fig­ured out a way to get rid of it, or how to delete it and/or just dis­able it. So that’s on the to-do list as well.

More to come on this — but I might share what I have found on power cables next (Hint — don’t buy the Ver­i­zon Car charger — there are cheaper ones that are the same or higher quality).

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Tags: Android, motorola, phone, smartphone, Technology

Category: Technology, Telephones