I am sure this happens to most of us. You unplug your fully charged phone from the mains in the morning. You then start to actively use it in the mid morning; you make calls, text, Whatsapp and of course do a bit of social networking. By lunch time you only have two thirds of the battery and by afternoon only a third of it is left. As you head back home in the evening you are hit by battery low alerts. So you switch off data and minimize the calls. For the social network addicts you now start tweeting via text. The traffic jams are not particularly useful since you easily get bored and unwind your earphones to listen to your favourite jams. Your twitter crush sends you a direct message on twitter and you are forced to turn the data back on in order to reply to the message. You then take the opportunity to reply to a few notifications and suddenly it’s a blackout. The phone dies. Some people carry around that backup Nokia feature phone but those who don’t are forced to survive the exile.
Battery life on our smartphones is probably the greatest challenge. Some manufacturers and tech experts usually advise on battery saving tips like turning down the brightness, disabling data and so on. Honestly, I don’t like such battery saving tips because it means that you don’t get to use your device like it was intended. By disabling all those features you revert back to a feature phone. What’s the point of having the best graphics if you won’t use it? Why have the best IPS display with full HD if all you will do is reduce the nits by turning down the brightness? In short you are buying an iPhone 5 or an Xperia Z or a Galaxy S4 and ending up with a Galaxy mini (no offense, just using the spec’s difference as a reference). So if you buy a HTC one you should get exactly that and not a HTC Desire C. But that means you will only use your smartphone for half a day. So what exactly needs to be done?
For one you can have battery life as your top priority specification. Evaluate the battery life before buying a smartphone. Go to the web and see what others are saying about the battery life. Most phone reviewers nowadays talk about battery life on a smartphone so you should check that. Sites like GSMArena and Engadget have standard battery tests so you should also check that out.
You should also know the kind of user you are. Android is arguably the best operating system but not really the best in terms of battery management. There are many reasons for this which I won’t tackle today. If you really don’t do much on your phone (and by that I mean if you only tweet and check mail and browse the web occasionally) then you should consider Windows Phone or even the iPhone. I can’t believe I just recommended iOS but those two platforms have no true multitasking hence no background apps to “eat up” battery. True android users know exactly why they need it. They use their droids to download torrents, play shadowgun, manage their blogs and websites and test out new ROMs every day. All this is done while the phone is connected to a wireless charging plate which doesn’t ruin the battery by the way. I guess my point is that before complaining about battery life on your device, first check if you have the right device in the first place. I know, I know, Samsung said the Galaxy S3 was built for humans. Well, that’s true but did they tell you who the battery life was made for?
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