Battery Saving Tips for Smartphones

Image via CrunchBase

We’re pretty lucky to be living in an age where we can put everything but the kitchen sink onto our phones, and bring it anywhere with us, but are our batteries living up to that?

To put it shortly, no, they’re not. If you’re like me and use your smartphone all day, you’ll have noticed that your battery really doesn’t like it. Although I only have experience with the iPhone.

So, I found an article which gives a few tips on saving your battery from an early death. I’m just going to go over the universal and iPhone tips, since I don’t have any experience with the other smartphones to write about them.

First, the universal tips, see if you do any of these:

(The article goes a bit more in-depth)

• Keep it cool and out of pocket
• Switch off 3G when it’s unnecessary
• Switch off any unneeded service
• Be frugal with background applications and notifications
• Fiddle with screen time-outs and brightness
• Use mobile site versions

Usually I have my phone with me all day, it’s a good way to listen to Spotify without static or any other noise from a computer getting in the way. I also use it to stay logged into MSN if I’m not at a computer. This means my mobile broadband is usually on in the background (3G, wi-fi). It’s always out on the desk so it can’t get too hot/cold.

iPhone specific tips:

• Apples official tips
• Toggle networks with SBSettings jailbreak app
• Use the battery percentage indicator
• Use Prowl, GPush, or very light Push for Gmail

I personally already use a Gpush app, it saves battery power and time by having to manually check every 5 minutes to see if you have been e-mailed. Plus getting push notifications is always awesome anyway.

I do see talk about jailbreaking the phone, but I haven’t tried that. I’m not sure if it will break the warranty with O2, but I heard it lets you run custom apps in the background. Tempting!  As far as I can tell though, you have switch back to 3.0 software – wouldn’t this remove all the 3.1 features like copy/paste etc?  The only thing I could find regarding it was this:

• Jailbreak For The iPhone 3.1 Is Here (ubergizmo.com)

Folks who own the iPhone 3Gs will now be able to jailbreak their iPhones running on the latest iPhone OS 3.1, thanks to the Pwnage Tool 3.1.3. There is one rather unpleasant condition though, the iPhone needed to already have been jailbroken when it was running iPhone OS 3.0 or iPhone OS 3.0.1. Currently you aren’t able to directly jailbreak the iPhone OS 3.1, though we’re fairly sure someone will find a way around that sooner rather than later.

Seems I’m still at a loss…

Spotify Goes Mobile

Quicker than I ever thought it would get there, Spotify announced yesterday that they are hitting the Apple and Android market.

As an avid music fan, this is really awesome.

Before now I didn’t bother with the iphone due to it not being able to hold all of my music – however, having spotify on your mobile is literally like having millions of tracks in your pocket.

Even half a year ago in March, Spotify had 2,582,501 tracks available. Doing a search now (this is done by searching for ‘”year:0-9999″ without quotes  (thanks Brett) – If you’re reading this in the year 10k, I don’t know what to tell you) pulls up these results:

Tracks: (4,401,049)
Albums: (396,229)
Artists: (328,578)

One thing that I did have on my mind when reading the announcement was what type of mobile broadband the iPhone has. Is it even called that on the iPhone? Wifi and 3G I suppose. Will streaming use up a lot of bandwidth? Downloading a single file on my current phone is like taking my bank account around the back of the house and putting it out of it’s misery. My guess is that if you plan on using this app, you’ll want a contract that permits a lot of free data browsing or something which has a fixed price. I bold this so no one can complain that they tried it and had to end up selling their house to pay the bill.

Something else to be taken into consideration is Spotify Premium. To use the service on your mobile phone you’re going to have to pay £9.99 a month or £119.88 for a year for premium, this is purely for using it on a mobile – the service is still free on a computer.

For fun I tried to work out the price of a Spotify track if you were to pay the Premium price (thanks to Brett again ’cause I suck at maths); Spotify comes out at 0.000002 pence per month per track vs iTunes at 99 pence for track that you will own (this seems the most common price, I couldn’t find an average). We were going to figure out price per track listened to in an average lifetime… but we’ll leave that for later. It works out that Spotify becomes the cheapest once you listen to about 5000 tracks though (if you like to count payment towards the songs you listen to instead of the millions you might not).

Quality wise, Spotify has the upper hand with 320kbps. Needless to say, if you do buy premium it will also apply when using your account on a computer. Before this app was released, Premium was quite expensive for what you got in return (although what they’re giving away for free is a huge incentive to support them anyway).

However, here are the advantages as they look now:

• Exclusives
  Exclusive access to pre-releases and concert ticket lotteries.
• No ads
• Travel access
  Go anywhere in the world and listen to your favourite music.
• Mobile music
  Use Spotify on your iPhone or Android device.
• Higher sound quality
  Stream music in a higher bitrate, up to 320kbps.

Here’s some of the features you’ll find on Spotify Mobile:

• Stream over WiFi or 3G
• Offline playlists
  Play music even without a connection, for example when riding the underground or on a plane.
• Access your Spotify account
  All your playlists will be made available.
• On-the-fly sync
  Add a track to a playlist and see it appear immediately on your computer and vice versa

A quick look at the app in action:

With all the focus on the iPhone, I actually haven’t mentioned the Android much. I’m pretty ill informed about both of the phones, to be honest. After reading articles about both, I still haven’t haven’t figured out which one would be better for me. With this new app though, I think I might be buying one. The problem is, dear reader, I haven’t a clue which. Input appreciated!

Would you like to know more? (points for knowing reference)

http://www.spotify.com/en/mobile/overview/