Get the most out of your cellphone battery life with these helpful power saving tips and apps, and these suggestions for better charging habits and equipment.

Check your current Android power use

• Settings -> About phone ->Battery use

Optimize your display

The biggest power consumer for your Droid phone is the beautiful 480×854 pixel screen. It typically consumes 1/3rd of my total battery between charges.

• Dial down your display brightness (Settings ->Sounds & display -> Brightness) and experiment with enabling the Automatic brightness option to see if will reduce your display’s power use. I have found that Automatic brightness makes my screen too dim in a lit room, but your mileage my vary.
• Adjust your screen timeout, which is the delay before the screen automatically shuts off after the last phone use. In the menu found at Settings -> Sounds & display -> Screen timeout, set the timeout to either 30 seconds or 1 minute.

Disable WiFi until you need it

Leaving wifi enabled when you are away from the home or office where you might be connecting to it is a constant drain on your battery as Android will be constantly powering up the wifi antennae to check for available wifi networks.

Android Power Control widget

• You can access the WiFi settings to disable it under Settings -> Wiresless & networks -> WiFi)

• You can create a button to give you one-touch enable and disable of WiFi (and GPS, Bluetooth) on your Android desktop with the Power Control widget. Long-press on the desktop to bring up the widget selector.

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  QRCode for WiFi OnOff

  

  WiFi OnOff widget

  If the Power Control widget is too large, you can download a one-button WiFi widget from the Android Market. One such widget is WiFi OnOff. Once downloaded, you can place that widget by long-pressing on your desktop, and selecting WiFi OnOff from the widget selector.

3G is fast, so I almost never enable wifi on the phone unless I’m home and planning on some extensive internet use with my phone or when I’m somewhere that has limited or no 3G connectivity.

Adopt new charging habits

Acquire charging equipment (see below) to make it easier to charge at your desk and on the go.

Charge your phone at your work and home computers. Get two micro-USB cables and leave them plugged into your computers so that you can simply plug your phone in if you know that you are going to be at your desk for awhile.  The cables are cheap, so get a spare micro-USB cable for your bag – it will let you charge your phone from any device with a USB port: any computer, a Playstation 3, some newer TV’s, and many other electronic devices.

Li-Ion batteries do not suffer from the “memory effect” where a battery may hold less charge over time or after being over-charged, so it is OK to leave your phone plugged in, even after fully charged, though it does waste electricity.

These cost much less than buying from the Verizon store:

Kill background processes

A cool feature that sets Android apart from the iPhone is better multitasking – the ability to run several processes/programs at once in the background. Nearly every app that is started on an Android phone continues to run in the background after you’ve navigated away from it. Android apps will continue to download Facebook and Twitter updates, or check for new e-mail, or update your position on the map in realtime – and apps that are already running are display instantly when selected.

QRCode to Advanced Task Killer

The Android operating system manages those apps that are running in the background, and will shut down apps that are no longer needed or to automatically free up memory. The problem is that it doesn’t automatically shut down background apps simply because they are consuming too much power or resources.

The solution is to install and use an Android task manager that can also kill running applications. I recommend Advanced Task Killer (free).

You can either search for it on the Marketplace or use Barcode scanner on this barcode:

Launching the Advanced Task Killer gives you a screen like this:

Tapping Kill selected apps will force those apps to stop running and free up the memory and resources that they were using. Most apps are selected by default, but you can de-select an app from being killed by unticking the box next to it. I will generally de-select Messaging and E-Mail from being killed, though E-Mail should be killed it least once per day to free up memory.

Advanced Task Killer sets itself to Auto Start – start automatically when the phone is started – and to Show Notification – display an icon in the notification bar. I choose to disable both of these default settings as I don’t need ATK itself running in the background and consuming memory, resources and power, and I don’t access it enough (see below) to want an ATK icon in my notification bar.

I usually only launch ATK and kill all of my background apps when:

• I’ve just spent several minutes using my phone and starting several apps that I am no longer using, especially GPS-enabled or auto-updating apps like Facebook. Those types of apps consume the most power over time.
• The phone seems to be running slower or lagging when starting apps or switching screens. Killing all running apps will make the phone much more responsive.
• I’ve received the “15% Battery Left” alert. Killing all running apps when seeing the alert usually gives me approx 4 hours of additional, reasonably heavy, usage before having to recharge.

As a pretty heavy Android user, I typically only need to launch ATK maybe once or twice per day. It makes a huge difference in both the battery life and the responsiveness of my Android phone.

Summary

Simply by disabling WiFi and killing running background processes when the phone seems to be operating slowly, I’m able to get at least 19 hours of heavy usage off of a full charge. I’m able to easily keep my charge topped-off by plugging in when I know that I’m going to be at my desk for an hour or two. Keep an occasional eye on your Battery use screen under the About Phone menu in Settings to identify any power hungry apps you may have installed.

Please share any other power use or charging tips in the comments section!

You can enable the tagging of your current location into the metadata of the photos you take using the default Android Camera application. Having this information stored inside your photos will let you be able to recall the location into an Android map or displayed in your Browser as a googlemap.

To enable GPS-tagging your images:  access the Settings menu in the Camera application by either swiping from edge or click the hardware Menu button, followed by Settings, and then click the toggle to enable Store Location.

This feature will remain enabled until you turn it off. Each time you start the Camera app, the phone’s GPS will enable and locate your current position to store within the metadata of the pictures you take.

View the location information of your photos

In Gallery, long-press on a photo’s thumbnail in the icon view and select Show on Maps. If you are viewing the photo full screen, you can click the hardware Menu button, followed by More and then Show on Maps. Show on Maps will be greyed out and unselectable for photos that do not contain location information.

You can then choose to open your Browser with the location in http://maps.google.com or to display the location in the Android Map app or in another location-aware app.  I recommend choosing the Android Map app as  it allows you to apply layers (satellite, traffic), and get directions / navigate to that location.

Share photos with location information

From within Gallery, selecting to Share a photo provides several options:

Picasa

Photos with geolocation data uploaded to Google’s Picasa web service (which is Google’s competition to Flickr) will display with a googlemap of the location.

Flickr

The best way to upload to Flickr from an Android phone is to enable your Flickr mobile upload email address. Share via E-mail from within Gallery and enter the email address provided by Flickr. You can add a name, description, and tags associated with this image by following the instructions. You can adjust the privacy settings of each image by following these instructions.

You can access your online photostream from your phone and use other Flickr features, including the ability to see pictures that have been taken near your current location, by visiting m.flickr.com.

I tested several of the free Flickr apps, and none seem to support preserving your photo’s geolocation information when uploading to Flickr. I’m hopeful that the upgraded Gallery app in the upcoming Android 2.1 software release will add this functionality.

Email, Messaging, Facebook

Geolocation information is preserved in photos that you share via email and messaging too!

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support the display of geolocation information in photos in their standard photo applications.

Privacy Concerns

Please keep in mind that photos you share with geolocation information will reveal the locations in which you took those photos, including possibly your home or workplace. Consider whether the photos you are sharing are going to be publicly viewable and think about whether you want that type of personal information about you available to anyone on the internet.

Resources

• General introduction to GPS photo tagging
• EXIF (photo metadata) information from Wikipedia
• GalleryMap is an Android app that allows you to view all of your geotagged images within the Android map applet at the same time.
  

  QR barcode to GalleryMap app

Namebench, written by google engineer Thomas Stromberg (his twitter), will allow you to locate the fastest domain name servers from your PC by benchmarking their response times. Namebench supports Windows, Mac OSX and Unix/Linux with both graphical and command-line interfaces.

Why does this matter?

Each time you browse to any address on the internet, your computer queries a server within the domain name system (DNS) to translate that address from human readable form (for example, www.facebook.com) into an IP address (for example, 66.220.146.21).  This query must complete before your computer can access facebook, youtube, cnn.com,  or any other website, online videogame, or internet service.

Speed up all of your internet use

Since a DNS query is a required first step in connecting to any website or internet service, the speed of the DNS server will directly impact the speed in which you can access content on the internet. If your current DNS server takes an average of 4 seconds to resolve addresses, you can count on an additional 4 seconds added onto every new internet access throughout the day. With perhaps 100’s of queries per day and 100’s of thousands of queries per year, you may be devoting dozens of hours per year to waiting on your DNS servers resolve.  Shaving a few seconds off of the average query translates into a nice payback of hours saved per year.

When your computer connects to the internet, you automatically get assigned to default DNS servers provided by your cable or telephone company.  These servers might be great, but they might also be a little slower than other free DNS servers that are available on the internet, such as those provided by Google Public DNS or OpenDNS.

Namebench will include your current DNS servers in its benchmarking to see how it stacks up against other alternatives, and it will recommend the fastest servers based on your browser history, location, and benchmark tests run right from your computer.

Redundancy

Your computer probably has a primary and a secondary DNS server defined in its network configuration.  This gives some redundancy for when the primary name server is unavailable due to server or network failure – your computer will eventually query the secondary DNS server. If both DNS servers are unavailable, which is more likely when both DNS servers are provided by the same company, your computer will not be able to translate any addresses and your entire internet service may appear “down.”

Specifying a primary or secondary name server from a different company than your internet provider will give you better redundancy. If your local DNS servers are unavailable, your computer could then query a DNS server that is completely independent, and therefore more likely to be accessible.

Get it

Download Namebench, install it, and run it with default options.

Leave your computer alone while the benchmark is executing so that you get results that are not compromised by any other activity. It is a good idea to shut down all running applications on your computer before running the benchmark as your open browser or email program might be busily updating facebook statuses or checking email in the background.

After about 5 minutes, the benchmark will complete. The results of the benchmark will appear in your default web browser. You’ll be able to see the fastest DNS servers based on your own browsing history and the location of your computer on the internet.

Note than even though this software is written by a Google Engineer, it does not give any special preference to Google’s DNS service in the results produced. If you have any problems or questions, here are additional instructions and information from the author of Namebench.

An additional recommendation is to run the Namebench at several different times during the day, for example once during prime-time work hours and again during prime-time evening hours as you may get slightly different recommendations depending on time of day. Since changing your DNS settings are enough of a hassle that you won’t want to be changing them frequently, it might be worth using the top result from each test, with preference given to the best server you found during the time when your internet use is heaviest.

Update your settings

Now that Namebench has identified the best DNS servers for you, let’s add them to your network configuration so that you can take advantage of increased performance.

Your current DNS settings are defined in one of two places: either they are defined on your PC or they are defined on your router (which in turn tells your PC which DNS servers to use each time your PC connects.) For brevity, I’ve only included instructions to change settings on a Windows Vista PC. If you need help configuring another version of Windows, or a totally different operating system, please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to get you specific instructions.

Change DNS settings in Windows Vista

• Click on your Start Menu (small windows logo in the lower left corner of your screen), and select Control Panel,
• In the Control Panel, select Network and Sharing Center,
• In the Network and Sharing Center, select Manage Network Connections (this option appears on the left side of Sharing Center window),
• Double-click your active network connection. It may either be marked as “Local Area Connection” or perhaps “Wireless Connection”, depending on whether you are using WiFi to connect to your network,
• In your network connection status window, click Properties. You may have to now give Windows “permission” to continue,
• Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), and then select Properties,
• In the General tab, click Use the following DNS server addresses and enter your preferred DNS servers from your Namebench benchmark,
  • If you currently have DNS server addresses defined in this window, make sure to jot them down in case you need to go back to them!
• Click OK to close the TCP/IPv4 properties window, and click Close your network connection status window,
• You may have to reboot your computer for the DNS new settings to take affect.

Change DNS settings in your router

Note: Changing the DNS settings in your router will override the DNS settings on all of the computers, WiFi telephones, and videogame consoles that connect to your router. It is better to change the DNS settings on a single device (for example, by following the Windows Vista instructions above) to test out the new settings first.

The steps to change the DNS settings that are provided by DHCP on your router depend on the manufacturer and version of your router. Consult your vendor documentation for the proper steps. Please remember to write down the original settings before you change them as you may want to return to your old settings later. If you run into trouble, please don’t hesitate to post a comment below and I might be able to point you in the right direction.

Resources at a glance

QR barcode to Namebench website(for supported mobile devices)

• Download Namebench
• Detailed instructions on using Namebench
• Detailed instructions on changing your DNS settings – Google DNS team article
• Domain Name System – Wikipedia article

Android notification bar

The top gray bar on the Android screen displays important information about your Android phone.

Along with the time, battery state, and network state icons, Android will also show icons in this bar when there is an update that may need your attention, for example a new text message, email, or voicemail. This bar, also called the windowshade because you can pull it down to cover your screen, is usually the quickest and easiest way to interact with those new and incoming events.

Here is a video from Google that demonstrates the windowshade feature:

Pull it down by touching the bar and then swiping your finger to the bottom of your screen … the bar will stretch and open up just like a window shade.

Newly installed applications will also leave a notice inside this windowshade, to give you the option of launching the application from there rather than pulling up the big menu and finding it.

Try observing your windowshade and interacting with it through the day. Android has done a smart thing by implementing this feature; rather than interrupting whatever you are currently doing when an incoming event, it will instead give a little beep, flash a notice of the new event in the gray bar, and then leave an icon there until you choose to interact with that event.

Here is a listing of the various possible notification icons you may see in the windowshade, and their meanings:

Battery is charging
Battery levels: full, 75%, 50%, 25%

Call is in progress
Call is on hold
Missed call
New email received
New text message received
New SMS/MMS received
New voicemail received
Visual voicemail (Verizon app) activity
Phone currently muted
Navigation enabled
Alarm is set
Call forwarding enabled
3G service connected, service roaming, service not connected
GPS enabled, GPS sending/receiving data
WiFi connected, WiFi not connected but networks detected
App downloaded or updated
Bluetooth enabled, Bluetooth device connected
Data syncing
More notifications available
USB Connected
Sync error or PC connection debug mode enabled
Audio file playing
Speaker-phone enabled
Upcoming calendar event
Uploading / downloading software
Airplane mode activated (cellular & WiFi disabled)