Battery Saving Tips for Android Phones

Switching to Airplane mode to save battery? Only an Idiot who is alone on some isolated island with absolutely '0' network coverage can go for it. Airplane mode also blocks any telecom signals, thus leaving phone good for Audio/Video only.

Task Killer? Really? Task killers are bad as they keep loose hanging threads of incomplete tasks of the apps that you suddenly just end using the task killer. Instead you should just go to the running tasks from the settings and stop things you don't need. Plus 2.2+ users don't really need to bother at all. I agree with an earlier comment - why not just use Nokia 1100 then if you think everything accounts to a bad battery life? In this article the author has just advised to remove everything that may, for some, make the phone exciting. I use Live wallpapers all the time and use my cell extensively and i stilll don't have battery issues. No haptic feedback , no live wallpapers, no notifications etc etc...Whats the point of having a smartphone?

Chill guys, nowhere in this article is it written that this is only for Android 2.2 Froyo and lets not forget that every Android phone out there has 2.2 Froyo, there are still many of us who cannot afford a more expensive phone with the latest Android version and many phones simply cannot upgrade to 2.2

Hey, contrary to what you have mentioned here, there are many websites (including the official android developers page) that state that its absolutely NOT necessary to use task killers on android phones. heres information directly from android developers page- "By default, every application runs in its own Linux process. Android starts the process when any of the application’s code needs to be executed, and shuts down the process when it’s no longer needed and system resources are required by other applications. A content provider is active only while it’s responding to a request from a ContentResolver. And a broadcast receiver is active only while it’s responding to a broadcast message. So there’s no need to explicitly shut down these components."

The article was going great until the "Use a task killer" point was raised. Since froyo, there's no need to use task killers or in other words, using a task killer is just another way to fill up your phone with crap. In Android, processes and Applications are two different things. An app can stay "running" in the background without any processes eating up your phone's resources. Android keeps the app in its memory so it launches more quickly and returns to its prior state. When your phone runs out of memory, Android will automatically start killing tasks on its own, starting with ones that you haven't used in awhile.The thing is that Android uses it's RAM differently than some other OS, say Windows. Having the RAM nearly full in actually good in Android. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck. Let's take up the example of Advanced Task Killer. Nowhere on the list does it mention the number of CPU cycles each app is consuming, only the memory you'll free by killing it. As we've learned, full memory is not a bad thing—we want to watch out for the CPU, the resource that actually slows down your phone and drains your battery life. Thus, killing all but the essential apps (or telling Android to kill apps more aggressively with the "autokill" feature) is generally unnecessary. Furthermore, it's actually possible that this will worsen your phone's performance and battery life. Whether you're manually killing apps all the time or telling the task killer to aggressively remove apps from your memory, you're actually using CPU cycles when you otherwise wouldn't—killing apps that aren't doing anything in the first place. In fact, some of the processes related to those apps will actually start right back up, further draining your CPU. If they don't, killing those processes can cause other sorts of problems—alarms don't go off, you don't receive text messages, or other related apps may force close without warning. All in all, you're usually better off letting your phone work as intended—especially if you're more of a casual user. In these instances, a task killer causes more problems than it solves.

Since Froyo (v2.2), usage of task killers has been redundant. What Android (basically Linux here) does is that it re-spawns the process that was killed within a few seconds without even asking you. This consumes CPU cycles during re-spawning and gives you a few moments of free RAM. I'd recommend using Watchdog that tells you which app is consuming a lot of CPU and that is what users should really look out for

If you're a Rooted User go over to XDA Forums & check how to delete Batterstats.bin & Re-Condition your Battery for Optimized Battery Life.

these suggestions have been around for ages.... how about suggesting something useful and something different like switching off hsdp and more advanced technique...

Why not just leave the phone home and use a nokia 1110 instead.

Hey Jayesh.. very nice and important article. I do almost all the things you mentioned here.. Only one new thing I found was to "Enabling plugins to on demand". I use HTC Desire (Froyo 2.2) and I didnt find this option. How can I do it on my phone?