Kuan Yean

Tag: phone

  • Get more from your smartphone battery

    Image copyright John Karakatsanis
    HTC Desire Z smart phone

    Whether you’re just getting into smartphones or if you’ve had one for a while, you can’t deny that the battery life that you get out of a smart phone is nothing like what you got from your old non-smart phone (dumb phone?). Here are some tips on how you can improve your battery life:

    1. Understand your battery

    Most smartphones these days use a lithium-type battery (Li-ion or Li-polymer usually). If you’ve had a Ni-Cd (nickel-cadmium) or NiMH (nickel metal-hydride) battery in the past, you’re probably in the habit of draining the battery completely before recharging it. Lithium-type batteries do not like this. In a perfect Li-battery world, they are at 100% all the time. This is obviously not feasible in the real world, but if you have a desk-charger at work or a charger in your car, keep your phone plugged in. Many smartphones also charge off USB power, so even if you don’t have a charger at work, having your phone’s USB cable plugged into your desktop or laptop computer should charge it too.

    Having said that, it’s a good idea to run a full charge cycle once every one or two months in order to re-calibrate the battery. This resets the battery’s thresholds for ‘full’ and ’empty’ so that it can correctly monitor and report its charge level to the phone’s operating system.

    The optimal operating temperature for a Li-type battery is between 0° and 35°C. So even your pocket may be a bit too warm for your phone. Certainly avoid leaving your phone in your glove box or in a warm car – electronic parts last longer if they’re not exposed to the extremes of temperature anyway, so be nice to your phone and keep it cool.

    2. Understand your phone

    The typical high-end smartphone has quite a few radios built into it. You can control how these are used and use a lot less power in the process.

    The cellular radio – which you use to make and receive calls (and send/receive text messages) – can be switched into 2G mode rather than 3G if all you ever do is talk and text. 3G is great for internet browsing and data, but if you don’t do any of that stuff all it does is drain your battery. Real-world tests have shown that you can double your talk time by running on 2G rather than 3G.

    Bluetooth is great for connecting to your car or wireless headset, but if you’re not using it there isn’t much point in keeping it on. Turning off the Bluetooth radio in this instance will save a bit of power.

    Wifi is another consumer of power, although if it’s connected and being used in favour of a 3G data connection it’s a bit more efficient. However if it isn’t connected to a Wifi network you may as well turn it off. All it’s doing is scanning for Wifi networks to connect to, which consumes a fair bit of battery power.

    The biggest power consumer by far would have to be GPS (if you have it). It’s certainly not a setting I’d keep on all the time, as it easily reduces my own phone’s standby time from 2 days to under 4 hours. Many phones also do a good-enough job of locating you using a 3G triangulation without the aid of GPS, so I only use my GPS receiver for navigation and not much else.

    There are other smart phone behaviours that you can change in order to make better use of your battery power:

    Turning off push notification is a big battery saver. If you don’t need to be notified of an email, facebook update or tweet as soon as it happens, turn off push notification – it’s usually a setting within the application itself. The application normally allows you to set a frequency for checking if you don’t want push notification, and there’s almost always a non-push frequency that will keep you in touch without draining your battery.

    Finally, most smartphones have an ambient brightness detector that allows the phone to automatically adjust the brightness of your phone’s screen (which is a heavy power user). Using this automatic adjustment saves the phone using a heavy back light load when it’s unnecessary. If you’re not convinced that this is giving you good results, you could always use a lower constant brightness setting. It rarely impinges on usability and is easily changeable on most phones, so that if you do need a temporary brightness boost it isn’t a drama to change.

    The location of all of these settings can be found in your user manual. I won’t list any here, because there are far too many to list. If you have any other tricks that you’ve discovered over time, feel free to leave a comment. 🙂

  • To buzz, or not to buzz?

    Nokia E71: Phone or email terminal?
    Nokia E71: Phone or email terminal?

    Most people these days have a mobile phone and at least one or two email accounts which keep them connected to the world. I, for one, am easier to reach by email, mostly because I find it easier to respond to things and initiate action on my device by email than by phone. Perhaps it’s time for an assessment on how a phone should and should not be used, and when an email would be more appropriate.

    To that end, I have sat down and thought about this for a while, and come up with a list of questions to ask yourself before giving whoever a buzz (including a few naughty things of which I am almost certainly guilty of doing myself). Most of these relate to business use of phones, but then there’s always a grey area, isn’t there?

    Do you need a response… now?

    If you don’t know someone too well, you wouldn’t normally go up to them and interrupt them in the middle of whatever they’re doing in order to get an opinion, sell something, or to see if they are free for an Amway meeting. It’s much more polite to leave them a note so that it can be attended to at their own pace. The demanding tone of that “ring-ring” can read as an unrelenting “I want to talk to you… now“.

    It hasn’t always been like that. Not so long ago, a phone call was the only way to get information out of someone that didn’t involve a postal service or pony express, and a subsequent wait of many days for a reply. Today however, we have a new standard – it’s called email. It is mostly free, very fast, leaves a paper trail and does not require that a tree be cut down so that you can send your lunch order to your secretary on its mashed up carcass. If you want someone to know something, email them. Call them if it’s urgent, but you may find your phone call’s recipient a bit harassed when they receive a phone call that could have easily been substituted by an email.

    Can you talk?

    In addition to that, we live off our mobile phones these days, and it’s not always easy to answer your phone when you’re out and about. The Japanese have very strict rules about public telephony, and I think they’re onto something – you will get a dirty look or even a reprimand if you are caught talking on your phone on a train; much more polite to send a message by SMS or email. No one sharing your train-space wants to know why you really dumped your ex, or how you turned your scalp all scaly on your third peroxide attempt.

    The Libran in me wants to see how the flipside can go wrong, and I can’t silence it, so…

    Email can also get a bit out of hand when it’s placed in the hands of those who perhaps don’t live off it. Perhaps a few pointers for email-sending are in order for balance.

    Is it too big?

    Consider the fact that business people will usually have mobile data plans that are charged per kilobyte before sending that 3 megabyte email. I have heard from at least one client about how the cost of downloading a large email exceeded the cost of getting in a taxi, picking up the sender and taking them out for a sumptuous lunch, over which the contents of the offending email could have otherwise been discussed.

    Remember that email as a medium was designed to transmit messages, not rich content. Where possible, keep emails to below 2 megabytes. If you need to send a file that is larger than that, use a document server (such as a SharePoint document library) or upload it to a file distribution service like YouSendIt (http://www.yousendit.com) or FilesAnywhere (http://www.filesanywhere.com) – when a file is uploaded, the recipient is automatically sent an email containing a link to the download. The latter facility is free and you will save your email recipients much grief. Trust me.

    Right address?

    Also consider the fact that some office email administrators set up very complex rules for forwarding incoming business email. Perhaps do that before you send that chain letter which ends up being automatically forwarded to someone’s entire client list. You can usually get around this by sending that all-important chain email to someone’s personal address. Work addresses are for work, and many workplaces may subject their employees to random checks and reprimands if they are found to be using work email for personal purposes (and that includes receiving personal emails).

    Right field?

    It’s not just to whom you address your email, but how you do it. The “To”, CC and BCC fields at the top of an email are so important, yet are still so often misused or completely overlooked. As a general rule, make sure anyone listed in the “To” or CC fields has explicitly allowed you to distribute their email address. You wouldn’t randomly give out your entire phone list; the same applies here. If there is more than once recipient, the other recipients will all be able to see the names and email addresses of anyone else in the “To” and CC fields. When in doubt, always use the BCC field. BCC stands for blind carbon copy – email addresses in this field will be hidden from other recipients.

    Should I send this?

    The scourge of spam. Familiar view?Then think about how much someone would want to sift through five of your emails containing pictures of kittens, when they have fifty emails in their inbox requiring urgent attention. That’s after the five hundred spam emails have been filtered out. It is in this environment that so many people get added to junk mail lists.

    Is this a big deal? It can be… I, like lots of other people, like hearing from people; it’s just that sometimes explaining that you didn’t see someone’s email because you put them on your spam list can get a bit tiresome. Should one feel offended because of it? Perhaps, but maybe one should have called…