Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe the Android guy now we've had quite a few discussions on batteries over at the android guy weekly if you've missed those make sure you hit the link at the end of this video so you can go back and catch up we've talked about how to keep your batteries more healthy and how to get more run time out of them but we've always talked about what you and I the end user can do to make our batteries last longer well what are the OEMs doing to get you better battery life so we're going to talk about in this week's episode of the android guy weekly so let's get the easiest one out of the way just put in a bigger battery now a lot of manufacturers are doing that but there's a race to have the thinnest device out there the thicker the battery is the thicker the device is going to be and you'd be amazed just how much of that devices thickness is the battery itself in fact a lot of manufacturers are building the entire circuit board around the battery to make up for it helps you keep things a little bit slimmer but you still have that bulky thick battery to make up for well the only way to make it thinner without a radical jump in battery technology is essentially to to scale back the capacity of the battery to make it thinner that works great except now your battery doesn't last as long and you're losing those milliamp hours left and right just so you can say hey I've got the thinnest smartphone on the planet for the next two weeks yay and then the newest finist one will be out so what are they doing well let's look at the droid razr motorola said hey this device is great but it eats battery life for lunch so what are we going to do they released a new SKU they released the droid razr maxx and it's amazing I go to lunch with a buddy all the time who's got a razr maxx he says his fabulous he listens to his streaming audio on it on the way to and from work while he's at lunch while he's in the server room makes phone calls on it all kinds of stuff and lunchtime he's barely barely dipped into the battery just hardly anything at all it lasts him easily through the entire day why don't more manufacturers do that well for part of them they just want to have a thin device for another part of them that they want to have an accessory that they can sell you for example the Galaxy Nexus comes with a 1750 milliamp hour battery it's decent it'll get most people through the day and that's about it you've got a charge either on the way to work or from work or you're going to be out of battery life by the time your nightlife gets around so what can you do go out and buy I think it's about 40 bucks a little bit less the accessory battery to take you all the way up to 2,000 milliamp hours doesn't have that much bulk to the phone in fact if you just got the phone with the 2009 battery and the replacement back cover which you will need by the way they come together in a kit when you buy them from Samsung or from an authorized distributor by the way essentially what you're doing is you're not even going to notice you won't notice that your phone is a little bit thicker but you will notice that it's got a lot more run time the second way manufacturers are trying to reduce the battery use is to turn it off when you don't need it now I'm not talking about the whole device I'm talking about adding either a nap or a control paddle setting that lets you basically tell it what you want to turn off when your battery is getting low so this is what Samsung has done with the galaxy tab 7 7 i'm in these settings and this is the battery saving mode over on the the right hand side that's my right not this side you've got all these different things that it does so when the when the power gets low you can turn off your Wi-Fi unless you're connected to an access point which is good if you're connected stay connected if you're not connected stop looking essentially it'll save quite a bit of battery life and extend that small amount that you have left even longer might be something that you want to do regularly through some other means and we'll cover those in upcoming articles and upcoming episodes of the android guy so make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't done so already we'll have a link at the end so we'll make it real easy for you the second thing this does is bluetooth turn off the blue tooth it's a radio it's broadcasting it's receiving it's looking for something to pair to even when it's not paired yes it's in low-power mode but low power still isn't no power it can automatically turn off bluetooth gps I don't need GPS unless i'm driving someplace or looking for something be perfectly frank I don't care if my facebook posts and my twitter tweets know where I am I want to save battery life more than that so you can turn that off entirely through a setting like this data synchronization I don't care about a new calendar update or a new gmail if I've only got three percent battery life left I'm probably not going to be able to read it or reply to it anyway so just don't tell me about them I won't miss them you might not want to do that or you might it's up to you you've also got brightness now this is a big deal we're going to come back to it okay hang on to that and then it's cetera etc it's kind of everything else where they put everything that doesn't fit in and it's just kind of more of the same so that's what a lot of manufacturers are doing some manufacturers are trying to reduce battery use by including pre installing and turning on a task killer now these types of apps are kind of controversial i'll let you have your own opinion of that i don't particularly like them i don't think they work all that well they're trying to do something that the operating system is already trying to manage they're trying to do it better now I don't know about you but I kind of think that Google has a lot more people working on android than some guy who has some task killer in the market that's just me but you see what I'm saying if you've got a task killer that works great fabulous let us know in the comments what is it and doesn't help you with your battery life that's what we're after here in this in this video do you have one that came pre-installed on your phone from motorola samsung HTC LG whoever it may be that does that and did it help extend your battery life I'm interested to find out I really haven't seen anything one way or another the last thing we're going to talk about is the biggest thing and that's hardware we talked about brightness any time you go into your settings you're going to find out that the biggest consumer of all of the power is your screen you'd be amazed how long these things will last when you don't turn on the screen if you don't believe me open up Pandora fire up a station listen to it I can listen all day long and just take a little bit of a dent out of my battery as long as I don't turn on that screen so that's the biggest thing of course you've got processors you've got motherboards you've got all of these other things that they're putting in there they have to to make the phone work but they're putting in things that are doing more on one or two chips rather than half a dozen ships that saves power they're also doing things with smaller chips with more efficient chips they run cooler they run at lower voltages they they consume less power to do what they need you to do some manufacturers most anymore i believe are using the scalability properties that are built into modern-day cpus so if you're running something very very computationally intensive should we put it that way it's going to chew up a lot of power because it's running full bore if you've got a 1.5 quad-core its run all four cores got confused because there's one quad core that has five course seems odd doesn't it anyway so it's running off one of those cars at 1.5 gigahertz that's a lot of power I don't need that when I'm just checking my email so hey why don't we just run it say 350 megahertz kind of interesting you can run utilities on a lot of phones that will tell you how fast the CPU is running and it will scale up and down based on what you're doing so very nice I don't know of any of any manufacturers that aren't doing that anymore so hey kudos to you but we're still coming back to screen what are they doing there screen technology has to improve screen lighting has to improve now does that mean that we're going to light it with a backlight and if so is that going to be you know a fluorescent bulb is that going to be LEDs is that going to be OLED what's that going to be or are we going to try and harvest some of the ambient life around us and reflect it back can we do that and still maintain good crisp clear colors and deep deep blacks see that's what they're doing and it's hard for them to do different screens have different properties to them some take more power than others pentile I know you guys hate it but it's one of the better out there as far as power consumption goes sure there are others that are better than that that's not the only reason that manufactures choose pentile displays but it is one of the reasons so they're doing a lot to try and extend battery life and it's really a team effort it's not just the OEM it's not just the manufacturer it's the chip provider it's google who's making the OS it's the customizations to that OS it's the right drivers it's everything working in concert but let's not forget you really can't be the nice extended battery so let us know what did what I miss what do you guys see manufacturers doing currently that we didn't talk about what would you like to see them do in the future to help them extend our battery life is that bigger capacity batteries and are you willing to sacrifice some thickness and some weight to get a bigger battery or do you want to see them improve technologically by improving the operating system or the hardware that goes into the devices so they take less power comment right down there below will cover each one of these topics in brief over at the website pocketnow.com and of course we want all the comments that you can to be over at pocket now so we can aggregate everybody all together in one place that's where I'm going to be to answer all of your questions for pocket now talking batteries and manufacturers for the android guy weekly i'm joe levi well a big battery these days is around 300 mil amp hours 3,000 milliamp hours hundred case there's some