subject: Dumbing-down Phone Prolongs Charge [print this page] My smartphone has been flashing a plaintive connect your charger plea for the past 18 hours, but so far the battery has lasted more than four days. How did I do it? I turned off mobile data (3G), wi-fi, bluetooth and GPS and turned the brightness down. In other words, I turned my smartphone into, well, a dumb one. I had a good reason to do so, but fortunately, you don't have to do anything quite so drastic to get better battery life from your phone.
Turn off wi-fi and GPS when not in use: these both consume lots of battery, so switching them off when you don't need them is a battery saver. Having said that, if you're constantly using maps or wi-fi, it may be more hassle changing the settings constantly.
Your screen draws a lot of power, so using it less increases battery life. If you can handle the brightness reduced (or switch on auto-brightness/ambient brightness), it can save lots of battery. Similarly, setting your screen to switch off after 30 seconds - or remembering to switch it off - helps.
Some apps, such as games, consume more battery. You should expect less battery life, too, when you're using a mobile browser - if you ran your browser the whole time your phone was on, you'd get about 50 per cent of the battery life. Some apps can help, however. Look for utilities that help manage the power-draining aspects of your phone easily, such as Green Power (Android, free).
THE POWER OF RUMOUR
Consider the curious life of a tech journalist. For two years now, I've been hearing rumours about an Apple iPad Mini. Its size has ranged from 5 inches to 7 inches, although the current rumours say it is 7.85 inches. This is twice the size of the iPhone 4 screen, so that makes some sense. Apparently it will be cheap, priced just below the iPad 2 ($579) and just above the iPod Touch ($459). Or it will take the place of the iPad 2. Nobody seems sure. It will look just like the current iPad, or perhaps more like the squared-off Amazon Kindle Fire. There are blurry, slightly out-of-focus photos that suggest either could be correct.
But the rumours reached a zenith (or a nadir, depending on how you look at it), when last week I read a news story that said that it was rumoured that Apple would be sending out an invite to an event on October 10 that would announce the forthcoming launch of the iPad Mini. Got that?
If the rumours upon rumours are true, we'll find out shortly. I'm not holding my breath.
CLOUD STORAGE
If you take photos on your phone, or want to share files or documents between your laptop, phone, desktop and other gadgets, one way to handle it is to use a cloud storage service. There are several popular examples, which are very good - DropBox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, Google Drive and Apple's iCloud. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and your choice may well come down to whether you use lots of Apple gadgets (iCloud.com), Microsoft webmail and services (SkyDrive.com), Google's email and apps (Drive.google.com), or a mixture (SugarSync.com, DropBox.com).
All of these services except Google Drive offer synchronisation. That means that if you change a file in one location, it will be updated to any other locations using the same account. So, for example, I have my phone set to automatically upload photos from my phone directly to DropBox as I take them, and these are then copied to my laptop and my desktop. On my desktop, I save new files into my DropBox folder, and can then open them on my laptop, from its DropBox folder.
The process takes minutes and it's nearly as easy as it sounds, but there are provisos to using cloud storage. You get a limited amount of free space (usually about 5GB), and any additional space will cost money (it averages $13 a month for 25GB).
You use data (whether 3G or broadband) to synchronise everything, so it can pay to be selective, especially if you synchronise your phone. Fortunately, you can set things up to only synchronise over wi-fi if needed.
Often, only a single folder on any computer or device is your synchronised folder, so you have to be careful that you put your files in that location to be able to share them.
