Updated: 8/13/2013
Part One - Do I need a battery saver?
Many users who load up their phones with a lot of apps, many of them free, will soon start to see their battery levels start to drop a lot faster than they did before. Then they will download a battery saving app in an attempt to fix the problem, and many times will only wind up making things worse. Many of the free ones will want to show you ads constantly, which may drain your battery even faster. Some may trick you into keeping your Internet connections open all the time when the screen is on, under the guise of saving you battery when the screen is off. In addition, there are a number of apps out there which are just viruses which users are being tricked into downloading through "scareware". There is even one which is a known virus which you can still download at Amazon.Com last we looked.
Also, make sure you read our blog post on Recommended Antivirus And Privacy Apps which recommended Clueful Privacy Advisor from Bitdefender. We had a perfect 100 Privacy Score in Clueful on our phone. However, after downloading a very popular battery saver with a rating almost as high as Battery Notifier Pro BT, our Privacy Score in Clueful dropped from a perfect 100 to 46! Just by installing this one app!
Many battery saver apps these days are also just task managers in disguise, which will turn off or stop all apps running in the background unless you specifically tell them which ones you don't want them turning off. We are certain use of these so-called "battery savers" are why we are disappearing from users' status bars more frequently these days, and then we get blamed when the battery saver turns us off. A battery saving app we tried from a well known manufacturer had a phone only mode which did this, but even worse, they falsely identified many of the apps on our phone including ours as being "power hogs".
And we hate to sound like a broken record, but it still shocks us today when we find very popular battery apps that want so many permissions. One we found had over 30 permissions. Do you really want a battery app having that much control over your phone?
If you want to know how much battery your "battery saver" is using, go take a peak at our post Least Battery Drain Verified Again! and then come back here for a battery saver I will mention in a bit that I do recommend for those users that need one.
Doing tests on our own phone using SystemPanel by NextApp inc., we found that keeping the Internet connections on all the time when the phone was just sitting with the screen on, drained our battery at about 6% per hour. Turning off the Internet dropped the battery drain to 3% per hour. When the screen turned off and it was put to sleep, battery use dropped to about 1.5% per hour. So obviously to save battery you want to keep the Internet off and the screen off as much as possible. Set your screen timeout to two minutes or less, and you will have solved half of the problem.
We still believe most people don't really need all those extra controls or an extra battery saver app running in memory constantly in order to save battery. Just do number one in the list below and keep all your Internet radios off and only turn them on when you need them. However, if you are one of those people who have to be constantly in sync with the Internet all day long, but don't want the battery drain associated with keeping the Internet on all day long, there is one battery saver we can recommend. It's called BatteryFu battery saver by Toby Kurien. It uses little battery or memory, and has just enough permissions to work properly. Best of all, it's free and it has no ads. It got many one star ratings when it first came out for being buggy with early versions of Android, but the bugs are gone now and the app has gotten mostly 4 star or above reviews for the past year. If you really feel you need a battery saver, it's the one we recommend.
For most people who don't need constant contact with the Internet, it's easy enough to just make some simple adjustments yourself to save battery, and here are the tips we've found that we believe from experience help the most.
Part Two - Battery Saving Tips
Radios
1) Turn off all radios you aren't using
This means switching off the WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and 3G/4G when you don't need them. If you don't have an option to turn off 3G/4G, put the phone in Airplane Mode. Turn off all the apps that are using GPS or location; many of them will keep using the GPS to determine where you are and feed you information based on your location.
2) If all signal strengths are about equal, to use the least battery use WiFi first, then 3G, then 4G. If you have a strong 4G signal, 4G may be best not because it will use less battery, but because it can download more efficiently.
Display
3) No live wallpapers. Darker wallpapers are preferable to light ones on some screens.
4) Put the screen timeout or sleep to the lowest setting that doesn't annoy you. Two minutes or less is best.
5) Turn off auto-brightness and instead drop the screen brightness to 20%, or the lowest you feel it still looks good to you.
6) Get rid of excess screen widgets, or else severely limit how often they update.
7) Turn off unnecessary display animations (Auto-rotate is OK).
8) If you have Power Saving options, turn them on and leave them on. The only exception here is if you find your Android status bar is particularly dull and hard to read, then turn the power saving off for the screen only.
Notifications
9) Limit notifications.
Notifications are useful, but frequent ones tax your battery. Be smart about which app notifications are enabled. Make sure those apps that are always busy, like Twitter or Facebook, aren't always refreshing with new updates and notifying you of them. With email, make sure you don't have notifications enabled for every new message.
10) Control background syncing
The more often apps sync, the more battery they use. And there are dozens of apps that sync: email, calendars, contacts, Dropbox, weather widgets, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, and more. Each app has its own settings, so go into each one and set the sync interval for the longest you can stand, or to manual or never for ones that don’t really matter. Facebook can ignore what is set sometimes and turns automatic syncing back on by itself. Likewise, Skype and Google Talk like to keep connections open and sync behind your back. Sign out of them when not in use.
11) Turn off automatic updates in the Google Play Store
You can leave the Notifications option checked to have Google Play notify you when updates are available, but we found the reminders got annoying after awhile, and now we just check for updates once a week or so. Download the updates when your battery has plenty left, and use WiFi when possible. Or plug in your charger, and then download the updates you want. Be sure to check to see if any updates have any added permissions.
Do a scan with Clueful when you are done to see if any privacy issues have changed.
Location, location, location
12) Control location services
This might be under Google Maps - Menu - Settings - Location Settings, or Google Settings - Maps & Latitude. Uncheck all of the following: "Report from this device" or "Location reporting", "Enable location sharing", "Automatic check-ins" and "Check-in notifications".
Battery Draining Apps
13) Eliminate unnecessary battery draining apps
We still feel the best battery monitoring app to eliminate apps that are draining your battery is the paid version of SystemPanel by NextApp, Inc. It's relatively simple to understand once you get used to the menus, and it can monitor apps over hours or days while still taking up little battery itself while it does the monitoring. We were able to eliminate some apps that we previously liked, but which we found were taking up over 3% of the battery each. Another option but a bit more complicated is Battery Stats Plus by Root Uninstaller. You can also share stats with other users of the app by uploading your stats to their website. It can show you "draining apps" which are above a certain threshold which you can tweak (default is 1%). One advantage over SystemPanel is they also have a fully functioning free version with ads. However, once we bought the paid version, we think they go a bit too far still pushing their other apps for our tastes.
Things that in my opinion don't matter much, that others say you should turn off:
1) Haptic feedback
2) Vibration
3) HTC sense
