How to extend your battery life on ALL tablets.

lorenii

Senior Member
May 2, 2011
347
57
  1. Turn the screen brightness down as far as you can stand. Mine is on 0 and I use it that way most of the time that I am inside and it works fine for me.
  2. Kill unnecessary apps running in the background. Settings/Applications/Running Services.
  3. When you FIRST charge your tablet, let it run down to auto shutdown before charging again. Do this as often as you can. If you put it on the charger before it is dead, it will retain a 'memory' and you start losing amp hours. I personally never plug mine in if it is above 20% and normally down to 10-15%. And ALWAYS charge with the tablet turned off, this puts the full voltage into the battery and not into running background services.
  4. Avoid using the tablet while plugged in. Plug it in, charge to 100% and unplug it and use it. When it runs down and you still need more time, plug it in and use finish what you are doing and then POWER IT OFF and finish charging to 100% and unplugging it.
  5. Do NOT leave the tablet plugged in all the time when you are not using it. All you are doing is cycling the battery/charging routine at 95%-100% back and forth and you WILL kill the battery over time.
I get a solid 3-4 hours of up time (using the tablet, watching movies and running my website) off of each charge just by following these simple rules.
 

Spider

Administrator
Staff member
Mar 24, 2011
15,785
1,813
Good advice, just be careful you don't turn the brightness down too far. There have been several threads from people who couldn't see anything on their screens because they went too far. Then, they couldn't increase the brightness because they couldn't see the page for adjusting the brightness.
 

jbenham

Official ATF App Tester
Oct 25, 2011
2,064
131
Curious as to the why of #4

Sent from my Sony Tablet S using Android Tablet Forum
 

Compu_Guy

Member
Nov 26, 2011
58
19
The phone.apk file is designed, as the name implies, to run the phone service. The Android OS loads this be default on bootup. If you actually look at the battery status and see what is using it, you will see "Cell Standby" is using the most. On the "Renaming stock apps" thread, you will see jatke's screenshot of this. This is post 13. Post 15 shows what happens after renaming this. Also, since it is loading it and "using" it, it will use your resources as well. I'm not sure what the phone.apk is trying to do since the tablets don't have a SIM card or even cell reception, but since it is in the OS it does load it and use it. Another option besides renaming this, would be to figure out how to put the tablet in Airplane mode. Not sure if this is even possible.

The phone.apk is the one that made the biggest difference for me. Once I renamed that, I swear the batter life has doubled and I did see a huge difference in performace. The resources aren't being hogged by something that isn't being used now.

There are other apk's in the system folder that I have renamed as well. Some are on that thread and some aren't. I ended up figuring out what was running and what I would never use (such as Video Player, since I use BS Player) and renamed them as well so my tablet was running the leanest that it could.
 

sherri64

Senior Member
Dec 26, 2011
94
13
Airplane mode turns off all wi-fi and data. I suppose if you are listening to downloaded/off line music, or playing a game that doesn't use data, this is fine.

Out of curiosity, since you need to be rooted to change name of system apk's, why not just freeze the phone app or uninstall it altogether?

New to tablets, but not to Android...

Thanks in advance!

Sent from my DROID using Tapatalk
 

lorenii

Senior Member
May 2, 2011
347
57
Curious as to the why of #4

Sent from my Sony Tablet S using Android Tablet Forum

Because you are 'teaching' your battery to use about 5% of the battery before it 'wants' a charge. This will, over time, kill your battery.
 

Compu_Guy

Member
Nov 26, 2011
58
19
Airplane mode turns off all wi-fi and data. I suppose if you are listening to downloaded/off line music, or playing a game that doesn't use data, this is fine.

Your right about this. So in general, Airplane mode wouldn't work. I'm not even sure it is possible. Just throwing out some ideas.

Out of curiosity, since you need to be rooted to change name of system apk's, why not just freeze the phone app or uninstall it altogether?

I'm not sure what you mean by freeze. There is nothing stopping you from just deleting the app once you get r/w access to the system partition. I really just started off renaming them since I didn't know what it would do, and if it still let it load but needed the app, then I could rename it back. Mine works great without it, so I'm not worried now.
 
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