battery life – SomeGadgetGuy

Battery life is voodoo.

No seriously, everyone “knows” what’s good for your battery. Charging it at night, during the day, disabling radios, fully depleting, never letting the battery get too low, turning on/off WiFi/BT/LTE/NFC. The tips and tricks are vast and often contradictory in what will result in better battery life for your mission critical communication gadget.

OverThought.org has written up a fairly comprehensive list of best practices for those of you wanting to hyper-mile your iPhone or iPad. Best of all it’s not just a trite list of useless suggestions like “use your phone less”, instead targeting specific usage scenarios and apps which can be notorious battery hogs.

From Multi-Tasking and App Quitting to turning off battery percentage, the article does a great job of examining commonly held notions about battery life, and delivers a number of great tips on how to get the most out of your mobile.

Even if you rock an Android or a Windows Phone, there are a couple good behaviors on this list which can help you out too. I’d highly recommend giving it a read.

The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain

This is the longest it has ever taken me to run a battery test.

Run time is a difficult feature to test. Benchmarking usually means throwing high usage scenarios at a device to see how long it can last under “worst case” usage. The phone runs hot, which means it runs somewhat less efficiently, and you end up with a number that you can share. If you test all phones the same way you can somewhat compare how all phones perform when they run hot.

The problem with real world testing is it takes longer, and your testing isn’t going to be consistent. Maybe I took more calls on my HTC one than I did during my Galaxy S4 during a similar 24 hour period. Maybe I gamed longer on the iPhone than I did on the Moto X. Basically I’m saying you should take the following with a small grain of salt… Continue reading “Real World Battery Test: The LG G2 – 47 hours to “Critically Low””