9 Tips To Increase Your Windows Phone 7 Battery Life ~ MobileFuse

9 Tips To Increase Your Windows Phone 7 Battery Life

Being a smartphone, every Windows Phone 7 device serves the purpose of being a complete system to be there for you in almost any department of your daily life whenever you need support. You want to shoot a video? Pick up your WP7 phone. Are you bored and want to play a video game? Look at all the exciting and addictive games present under the “Xbox Live Games” menu.

You have to surf the internet, perform official tasks or even read a book? You guessed it, WP7 has all that. But if you apply common sense to the above discussion you will realize that all these functionalities don’t come cheap in terms of battery life. To perform all the tasks of a smartphone you need battery juice, and loads of it. However what’s the use of a mobile phone if you have to sit rooted to your wall charging inlet for the whole day with your phone plugged in?

Thankfully the situation is not too hopeless. There are ways that will make your WP7 battery last more than a day (or maybe even way more than that), which is pretty respectable for a smartphone. Some of these tips might seem too simple and basic, but does that really matter if you get even an hour of extra battery life?

Turn Off Wi-Fi Whenever Idle:

It is common knowledge that communication protocol services such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are giant battery eaters. So whenever both these are not in use, make sure that they are turned off. This will be slightly inconvenient if you need these services on a regular basis, but on the other hand it will go a long way towards increasing your battery life.

Listening To Music With Locked Screen:

There are quite a lot of WP7 users who like to use their phones just like an iPod, that is, to listen to music all the time. This task is quite battery consuming, but we aren’t stopping you from listening to your favorite songs. All you have to do is to make sure that while listening to music, and doing nothing else on your phone, you lock your screen. This will turn off the display light for one thing, and also many of the default active tasks will go to rest thereby reducing battery consumption.

Switch Off Auto Brightness:

Whatever you do on your device, it is done through your phone’s screen display. This makes it the primary batter consumer in your phone, especially with the improved and modern displays being launched in today’s market. Trading off the graphics quality of your device, you can switch the brightness of your phone’s screen to as low a level as possible. This will mean turning off features like Auto Brightness.

Turn Off Xbox Live Auto Connect:

Go to the Applications menu in your WP7 phone and navigate to settings. You will find the option of Xbox Live connectivity there in the menu. Disable it. This will save you considerable battery time, and you can simply turn the option back on when needed.

Use Black Themes:

Black is the default color present in WP7, this means that if there is no color present, black will be there. In addition to that black is less radiant than white or a lighter color and hence uses less battery. The theme or wallpaper you choose doesn’t necessarily have to be black, any dark color will do the trick.

Don’t Use Automatic Synchronization:

Synchronizing your phone’s e-mail or OneNote services automatically with your Windows Live account is sure to consume lots of battery as these syncs will constantly keep connecting to servers and that needs juice. So use manual synchronization whenever you need it. Your phone can breathe easy if you share some of its burden.

Set Social Networking Sites To Manual Refresh:

Facebook and Twitter on your WP7 device have the feature of refreshing automatically every few seconds. Although this looks cool when you receive live updates but unfortunately consumes a ton of energy. Turning auto update off can counter this situation. Also minimize the use of the People hub.

Connect To Your PC Using USB Cable:

You can sync your device with Zune via Wi-Fi, but the more power-economical method is to connect using a USB cable.

Miscellaneous Possible Measures:

Keeping screen time-out to a minimum is always helpful and so is turning off WP7 feedback and all automatic updates for apps.

Some of these changes will reduce the convenience that WP7 comes up with but what’s all the convenience in the world compared to your device running a longer amount of time, as nothing will be there if your device gets switched off during the middle of the day.