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]

red "to"

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

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.

 

[christim]

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 .

from your pm to me, which I'd rather answer here so others benefit from it to (anyone feel free to pm me, but include a link to the thread the question is in for a reply)

I was wondering if you could help me with battery life . I posted a reply in a section here regarding it , but I'm not sure if/when you would read it . Anyway , I was at a water park yesterday and my battery went MIA after about 6 hrs . I do use the internet frequently , but just for browsing like sports scores or email etc. etc. I don't know what apps will drain the power while running in the background like FB or the news/weather widget . Also I read somewhere that if you turn of GPS in the menu that helps , but i did that and didn't notice a difference . In other words , what are the best options for maximizing my battery life ? Thanks for any and all advice and help .

You can turn the brightness down, turn off wifi, bluetooth, and gps and that will help conserve battery power. You also could just leave the phone off too. Turn it on once an hour to see if you have any missed calls or txt messages and you'd most likely be good to go. The GPS might not be so bad if you aren't using navigation or maps. If those are on your battery will be dead in an hour or two easily.

Weather apps can be set to grab the latest weather at certain frequencies, especially if they are a widget.

I agree with the solar recharging statement. I think it won't really help for power users, or even normal usage. Spare batteries are the best solution for extended stays from AC power or cars.

 

[JasumX]

I've been using an app called juice defender for a very long time and it seriously multiplies youe battery life by automatically turning off wifi and 3g and turns it on once every hour for 10 minutes (or various times of your choosing). It will also keep these on while the screen is on. Cellular stays on all the time.