Extending Battery Life

[dsf]

Taking my droid backpacking and was wondering best way to set the phone into a sleep to extend the battery...

thanks

[elspringer]

I just got back from a four day camping trip in the mountains of Virginia and though I rarely used the phone putting the phone in airplane mode and only taking it out when I needed to made my battery last the entire weekend.

[christim]

I'd power it down and only use it when you need it. The advantage of a cell phone is you can reach people from from roads. It is probably more important you can reach someone if need be, than that they can reach you. No way will a My Tracks type app work for extended time.

You could try a solar charger too. That will extend your time. There are hand crank options I see on Amazon too, but I don't know how long either method would take to recharge your phone. Walking along a trail cranking a handle seems like an easy task though. Same thing sitting around the campfire in the evening.

[christim]

Juicebar Pocket Solar Charger has good reviews.
It is a rechargeable battery pack that when full can recharge a typical cell phone multiple times. It doesn't define "typical" though. The plus is while your phone is fully charged the Juicebar batter can start recharging to be ready for next time. Various reviews on the web show it to work well.

FreeLoader Portable Solar Charger is another product out there worth reviewing as an option.

The hand crank rechargers didn't seem to get good reviews.

[tribeguy1971]

Whats with the red "to" in all of your comments ? Just curious if there is something I'm missing ? Also I would like to know if there is a way to extend my battery life . Yesterday I was at Waldemeer Park and my battery was dead in about 6 hrs . I do use the internet frequently but just for browsing , not downloading or watching movies . It seems that I should be getting a full day of power , not 6 hrs . What apps that I may have running are draining my life ( FB , news/weather , etc ). Please help . Thank you .

[zerosouls]

I would be careful with solar energy recharging, I don't think we really have gotten to the point where solar charging comes anything close to satisfactory. While I don't doubt the usefulness of this type of charging, I just think it could use a lot more improvement.

Just throwing out my opinion from past experiences, would love to stand corrected on this however.

[PetRiLJoe]

Whats with the red "to" in all of your comments ? Just curious if there is something I'm missing ? Also I would like to know if there is a way to extend my battery life . Yesterday I was at Waldemeer Park and my battery was dead in about 6 hrs . I do use the internet frequently but just for browsing , not downloading or watching movies . It seems that I should be getting a full day of power , not 6 hrs . What apps that I may have running are draining my life ( FB , news/weather , etc ). Please help . Thank you .

When you do a search within droidforums.net and click on a link that you thought was what you were looking for within the search, the words you typed in the initial search are usually highlighted in red . This could just be for me, but I am pretty sure it's a theme. If you are on your computer in the browser and use CTRL+F to find certain text within a webpage, it will generally highlight the text yellow (at least it does for me in Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers) but this red text is a droidforums.net search thing, I think.

About your battery issues, are you used to having a PDA-like phone? Many newcomers are surprised by the battery life a PDA / smartphone has compared to their old phones. I actually have to change the way I use my phone in order to keep enough battery for the day depending on what I have planned for the day. Other tips and tricks are all through this forum about what to disable and what to enable in order to get a little bit extra juice out of your battery.

[dsf]

Thanks for the helpful information.

I was slow to shift to a PDA partially due to the battery life issue.... I love the phone... I have found that normally the biggest drain on my battery life is kids.

Airplane mode and kids are quick and easy first fixes.. I will try the other ideas to see what else works best for us.

Thanks again

[takeshi]

Also I would like to know if there is a way to extend my battery life .

There are a lot of threads on maximizing battery life. It really comes down to how you're using your Droid specifically. There aren't one-size-fits-all solutions.

Poor/no coverage will negatively impact battery life. If you know you're in an area with poor coverage then switch to airplane mode (or just turn it off) until actually needed.

[st3V3]

You could always make a portable battery charger. I used instructables.com. I too enjoy going out on hikes and am going to use this option to keep a good battery. Otherwise you could buy one of those Energizer portable chargers, a bit pricey but for what you will use it for could be what you need.