The scathingly short battery life of Android phones has really been no secret in the Mobile Phone world. It’s quite a trade-off actually; Android powered mobile smartphones make up some of the most powerful mobile devices out there on the market, yet most of them have an average battery duration that can barely last through more than a day. You’ll get the rare diamond in the rough that could pump out a good 40 or so hours (Think HTC Sensation XL), but many wouldn’t get their hopes up for their phone to have a nice easy simple overnight recharge, before its up-and-go again for work the next day.

There are several factors that could be attributed to the cause of such minuscule battery life. The increasingly thinner design of Android smartphones as of late (i.e. Samsung Galaxy Nexus, in all its flimsy glory) prompts an obvious limiter for the battery space. Other reasons are larger screen displays, increasingly demanding specs, increasing processor speeds, and multiple programs running in the background of the phone. The transitionary shift from 3G to 4G also gets its share in the root of the battery life dilemma.

Although, Android users and fan-goers need not dismay, there are several things you could do to prolong the amount of time the battery life will last before getting some shuteye. This article will be highlighting a list of 10 great things you could start doing right now to help improve the battery life of your own Android mobile smartphone device.

For those interested, check out another article of ours here about Which Android Mobile Phone Device has the best battery life

Before beginning, it may be wise to examine the causes behind what’s making our Android battery life drain away so quickly. Breaking it all down as to what exactly is eating away at the battery, and what function is using your battery life the most. You could do that by (Depending on your phone) checking under Navigate to settings ->About Phone-> Battery. This is how it looks like on a Samsung Galaxy S2, but the navigation and settings should look pretty much almost similar across the Android phones.

1. Disable animated wallpaper and other flashy eye candy extravaganza

As pretty and appealing as they may look, they certainly don’t help your battery soldier on throughout the day. Disable them to save a fair portion of battery life. You’ll never know when you might just need that little extra amount of juice left. Although, if you do really want to have at least some dash of elegance on your Android smartphone, you may be able to find a balance somewhere in between blinding animations but power consuming, or power-saving but completely devoid of stylishness.

2. Re-adjust the screen timeout

It doesn’t make a difference in the moment as far as you could see straight away, but wasted energy on a lit screen that you’re not looking at, or using at the time would convert into meaninglessly lost battery life that could have been well spent doing something useful on your phone. You can re-adjust the screen’s timeout interval by going under the phone’s settings, display and screen timeout. It may take a few tries to select the timeout interval that you’d be comfortable with.

3. Turn off your mobile phone vibration

Not much to say here, but much like screen timeout or animated wallpapers, the phone’s vibration should be kept to a minimum as it does anything but help spruce up your battery life. If able to, it should only be used when your phone’s in silent mode.

4. Set display brightness to adjust automatically

The fact that Android’s phones huge screens helped earn them the reputation as a huge consumer of battery life is a gross understatement. Much of this reputation could be attributed to by the sheer brightness of the screen.

Apart from the all-too-obvious “well just lower the brightness then” response an average simpleton might tell you, you could actually set it to automatically adjust the brightness, so that the operating system would lower the brightness when in a darker room, or dimmer atmosphere, and generally adjust accordingly to how well-lit a room might be. Not only does it save your battery life, but it sure beats the heck out of manually adjusting the brightness all the time.

5. Disable Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash is great, but when left to load everything, it can be a real juice drainer for your battery life. The thing with Adobe Flash on your Android smartphone is that, it will automatically run every bit of Flash content on any webpage by default. You can quite easily set it so that it loads only upon instruction, by going into the web browser and (once again, depending on your phone) select On Demand by going into menu, settings, and enable plug ins.

6. Charge your phone at a suitable temperature

This one gets frequently overlooked, but the truth of the matter is, if you charge your phone while it’s exposed to temperatures that are too high or low, your battery could suffer, and you may need to replace it sooner than you would of liked. Direct lengthy sun exposure can harm your phone’s touch screen, and cold conditions can sap the power out of your battery. The most charge-appropriate temperature would be from 15 to 25 degrees Celsius, in a well-ventilated area.

It may also help to take off the cover of your smartphone when charging it up, or else it’ll accumulate a lot of heat which will serve a great detrimental effect to your Android mobile phone device, and ultimately; to your phone’s battery.

7. Disable your Wi-Fi and other connections when you don’t need them

Although, Wi Fi will really help you speed up the process of data access on your smartphone, it would take a fair bit of a plunge on your battery life, if left enabled when you don’t need it.Tricky thing with Wi-Fi as well, is when you’re out; it will keep scanning for all available wireless networks regardless of whether that was your intention or not to do so.

With Android phones you can easily and directly switch it on or off via shortcuts or widgets. Android phone’s usually come with a drop down notification menu that you can just pull down, and so you could also toggle Wi Fi and other connections on or off that way too.

8. Update your apps

An interesting fact that a lot of people don’t know is that you can save a whole lot of battery life just by making sure your apps are up to date. Manufacturers often update their apps; making them more power-efficient and power saving to use less battery life is one such reason why.  Some apps can be set to update automatically, while others need to be done manually via Market apps, through My Apps, under the
menu.

9. Reduce email, Facebook and Twitter Activity

This one is quite a biggie.. This and also getting rid of unnecessary home screen widgets that sync and pull in status updates constantly. Don’t even get me started on the built-in email tool with push technology too.. Eugh.. The things a devil.

It is best to set these tools so that you can sync them manually, by hitting refresh whenever you need to read you’re emails. However if you absolutely must need it to sync automatically, just do well to try and make it sync on a lesser frequent basis. This can be done by going into your account settings under the email application, and setting the frequency of email checking to something like an hour, or a day etc. This is much better as opposed to hammering you every 15 minutes or so, as it’s automatically adjusted to do.

These settings are relatively similar for Facebook and Twitter, so you should have no problem setting the activities and notifications for those.

10. Get the Juice Defender App for your phone

Downloading a battery-saving app such as Juice Defender or Juice Defender Ultimate would greatly save battery life and improve its performance, the annoying part about Juice Defender though, is that they greatly limit and restrict Wi-Fi connections and internet, making it a pain in the ass having to switch it on again when it turns itself off.

Juice Defender Ultimate provides somewhat, an alternative around this problem though, with scheduling for when you want to switch your Wi Fi and connections on and off. You could also set up factors and boundaries for a number of aspects such as the location for you to turn Wi Fi/Connections on and off at specific times and places.

Juice Defender has got mixed results and outcomes from different users, with many reporting a distinct difference in its performance in each and every one of their individual phones. Nonetheless, it has proven itself very effective, and I was able to get a good extra day of usage out of using it on my own Samsung Galaxy S2.