Brilliant battery life for Android

Some applications can use up a lot of system resources and thus drain your battery of much needed power. Specially things like task killers, WLAN and video recording/playback hog a lot of CPU and memory. After a while you start to notice a steep decline in the amount of time your battery will be able to power your Android device. Rooting your phone and installing a custom ROM is also one of these things that makes the battery somewhat less effective. I recommend to use these steps when you think your battery is not what it used to be, or specially after flashing a new ROM to your phone (always do a wipe of your system before doing this otherwise the drain can be huge). Do not under any circumstance allow a task killer to monitor your memory usage, this takes a lot of battery time!

This is all caused by the fact that your phone uses a smart battery that makes its stats like charge and current available for readout in the OS itself. There is a solution to reset those stats and give back some battery power to the phone.

First off, download and install these two apps:

Current Widget
BatteryCalibration 

After installing them place the Current Widget on your desktop and set it to read out the battery current. Charge the phone completely until the Current Widget says the current is 0mA (or at least very very close to that). You are now completely sure the battery is fully charged because the readout in the OS itself can be wrong. In short even though it says 100% it can be partially charged. Turn your WiFi off.  If your phone is rooted, delete the file ‘data\system\batterystats.bin’ with a file explorer to reset your battery calibration, and reboot your phone (completely shut it down and power it up again).

Now load up BatteryCalibration while keeping your phone plugged in to the charger and let it calibrate. Done! That wasn’t so hard, now was it?

I also recommend the app Spare Parts you can use this to identify memory or CPU hogging apps. On a side note, HTC sense accounts drain battery like you never seen before, dont use it, ever. Seriously, don’t!

To sum up:

  • Avoid installing a Rom without wiping your system before.
  • After installing a new Rom, calibrate your battery.
  • Do not use taskillers, and certainly don’t let them monitor actively in the background!
  • Don’t use HTC Sense account, it can use much CPU and thus drain your battery.

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