Page 42 - May-June-July Life In Naples
P. 42
naples mac help
Smart phone battery draining fast?
These tips will help it last!
A nyone can make a few simple changes to their phone’s “fetch” instead, where the phone polls a server on a schedule—say,
settings, or to their own behavior, that can have a every 30 minutes—or only when you manually tell the phone to
significant effect on how much power a device uses. do so.
USE THE SCREEN LESS— If you have a single email account and you don’t receive much
OR AT LEAST TURN BRIGHTNESS DOWN email, you won’t see a real difference in battery usage between
push and fetch. But the more accounts you have on your phone,
The screen is what uses the most battery on any portable device, and the more messages and events each of those accounts receives,
so the longer the screen is on, the faster the battery will drain. the more energy your phone will use, as it has to communicate
with those account servers continually.
A quick and easy change is to shorten the delay until your
phone automatically turns its screen off. On an iPhone, go to STORE MUSIC LOCALLY
“Settings” then “General” then “Auto-Lock;” on an Android
phone, go to “Settings” then “Display” then “Sleep.” Alternatively, Streaming services— such as Pandora, Spotify and Apple
you can manually put the phone to sleep whenever you’re done Music— require your phone to maintain an active wireless
using it. connection—Wi-Fi or cellular—to the service you’re using to
stream music. This active connection consumes a significant
Most phones offer an auto-brightness mode that automatically amount of power in comparison with playing that same music if it
adjusts the screen’s brightness based on ambient light: In bright were stored locally on your phone.
environments, the screen gets brighter, in dim environments, it
gets dimmer. In other words, enabling auto-brightness will save CONSULT YOUR PHONE’S BATTERY-USAGE
most people a good amount of battery life compared with setting SCREEN TO FIND THE BIGGEST OFFENDERS
it to a bright level all the time, though not as much as if you kept
the brightness down all the time; the advantage of auto-brightness Both phone platforms provide a simple way for you to see
is that the screen will remain easily readable in all environments. which apps are using a lot of battery power. For example, on an
iPhone running iOS 9, go to “Settings” then “Battery,” and scroll
USE AN AD BLOCKER down to “Battery Usage” to see a list of the apps using the most
battery power, sorted by the amount consumed. By default, the list
Much of the debate around using this kind of software, which shows battery use over the past 24 hours, but you can tap “Last 7
is designed mainly to prevent certain kinds of ads from loading Days” to see data from the past week, which is often more useful;
while you’re browsing websites, focuses on revenue (for publishers) be sure to tap the little clock button to reveal information about
and annoyance (for readers). But ads, just like any other form of how much of your battery life each app is consuming when you’re
online content, use resources: Your phone must download the ad actively using the app (“screen”) versus when you’re not (“backg…”
images and video and then display them (often running browser or “background”).
scripts too), and these tasks use energy.
On Android, you can see a similar list by going to “Settings”
SWITCH FROM PUSH TO FETCH EMAIL IF YOU then “Battery;” here, too, you’ll see a sorted list of the items that
HAVE MANY ACCOUNTS OR GET LOTS OF EMAIL are using your battery power. “Screen” is just that, your backlit
display, while “Google Play Services” is a catch-all label for many
A feature called push automatically delivers new email, new or apps background actions. Tap on an app, and you’ll see detailed
revised calendar events, and updates to your contacts list (such as statistics. You’ll find the most useful information in the “CPU
from a Gmail or iCloud account) to your smartphone whenever total”and “CPU foreground”timers.The “foreground”figure refers
such changes occur on a central server.Although push is convenient, to how much time you had the app open; subtract “foreground”
the feature can use a sizable amount of power, as it requires your from “total,” and you’ll know how much time the app has been
phone to always be listening for new communications from your busy in the background.
account provider. Most phones let you configure them to use
42 Life in Naples | May • June • July 2016
