 Today's episode of the Android Invasion is brought to you by MtGox, mtgox.com and usgoldcoins.com That's 1-800-HOT-COIN and MEZIGIRL, M-E-Z-E-GIRL-DOT-COM Hey guys and welcome to the second episode of the Android Invasion. Today I wanted to make a special episode in regards to the most popular battery myths. A lot of myths that you hear about there, it's going to be a Myth Busters episode where we take a lot of popular misconceptions and then I'll tell you the facts and then the actual proper way to get the most out of your battery. So first of all, I'm sure everybody has heard of Task Killers. They open up the Task Killer and it has like 30 different programs in there and people freak out. They see only a limited amount of free memory and then they think that this is draining their battery and causing all sorts of problems. But Android is actually designed to do that. Android was designed from the ground up to be sort of a mobile platform and it takes sort of like a couple of tricks or shortcuts to make the performance seem like it's acting really fast. And the way that it does that, it loads most programs that's most likely to use into memory and it won't kill anything until it actually absolutely has to. So basically it has its built-in, its own built-in Task Killer that does a much more efficient process than any person could possibly do and you'll probably avoid a lot more problems that way. So we'll just get into very quick, be a short episode sort of detailing everything. There's basically, first to overview on how it works this way, you understand why Task Killers don't work. There's basically three states or three sort of, instead of a state you could say three modes that a program would be or app would be in. And the first one would be running, where it's actually running using resources, you know, using your battery. Then the second would be sleeping, which most of those programs that you see in your Task Killer list are going to be sleeping programs that are just hibernating. They're not really using any processing power and very, very limited resources. This way, when you actually need to switch to it, instead of starting it from the beginning, loading everything from the SD card or the actual physical drive of the phone, it's going to load it from the memory, which is much, much faster. And that's how you see, you know, when the apps load super quick or app drawer, it's because it's been sleeping and it's just being invoked versus, you know, started from the beginning. Then the last one is zombie. That process is basically when you're killing the app. Now app killers are a great idea when you have a pesky app that doesn't want to die, you're trying to kill it, force clothes doesn't work. Then you use a Task Killer to make sure it's dead. Basically, most of the times that you're using a Task Killer, it's just going to re-pop up anyway. And you're actually using more resources trying to kill those apps than actually, you know, not using the Task Killer. So it's actually going to have a negative effect on your battery. And it could cause problems with any scheduling programs, alarms, things of that nature. So not a good idea to use Task Killers. Now, I will show you an alternative to that. Another big, well, the biggest, probably two of the biggest battery drainers are, A, your screen. And the second one is apps like the Facebook app or the Twitter app that are constantly polling for information. So a lot of the Facebook people, you know, they'll have it set to try to get an update every five to ten minutes. So basically what the phone has to do every five to ten minutes, it's going to use your internet connection. It's going to see if there's anything new in there. It's going to have to load up Facebook in order to do that. And that's going to drain a lot of resources. And it's going to do that regularly every five to ten minutes or whenever you have it set. So a good idea for, you know, any Facebook app or Twitter app or any sort of syncing period to have that set at least, you know, half hour an hour, 12 hours, six hours, something where it's not going to be polling that much. Actually your best bet is to disable syncing and only update it when you want it. This is if you really want to conserve on battery. And then let's see, let's actually go into our phone. And on all Android systems you will see that there's actually a way to see what's using up your battery. So let's do that. First what we're going to do is from the home screen hit menu, then settings. And then you're going to want to go down to where it says about phone. And then where it says battery use, you're just going to tap on that. And then you'll see here that my phone has been on for about five days and 20 hours. And the most of what's been used up on my phone is actually what's draining the most battery on my phone is what's called the cell standby. And that's when my phone is in standby, so that's a whopping 29%. Then we have the actual Android system, which is another 25%, then my phone idle. Now the stuff that's really using the most of my phone would be voice calls and maps. My display before is at 3%, but for the show I have it at full brightness. So that's actually draining more than what it usually does. And then there's a couple more over here, like Wi-Fi calling. For the Wi-Fi calling it's actually a T-Mobile app that I do not use anymore or never actually used because I don't have T-Mobile anymore. But with the Wi-Fi calling I cannot uninstall it unless I'm rooted, which I am rooted, but I'm just too lazy to uninstall it. So this is going to give you sort of a good idea of what's really using the most of your phone or what's draining the battery the most. And then, so now let's actually get into the tips where we could actually save you some battery life. On the phone again, the best and most recommended way is to have some sort of power widget. I'm running Cyanogen Mod 7, so your phone might not look like this, but if you go on the Android market you will find some widgets that allow you to quickly switch certain things off. What you want to do is you want to turn everything off that you're not using. If you're not using Wi-Fi, turn it off. If you're not using your Bluetooth or GPS, turn that off. Now this widget is a little more advanced where I could actually turn off any sort of syncing. I could turn off the actual internet connection. I could also toggle off and on the 3G. So I also have it set up. This is actually, let me just show you guys, you could actually customize this widget if you're running Cyanogen Mod. The way that you do that is you add a widget and then you look for the power control. It's going to give you all sorts of options. This is going to give you the most control out of possibly anything. It even has certain conditions where if I turn on the Wi-Fi, it's also going to turn off the 3G. So if I turn on the Wi-Fi, it automatically knows to disable the 3G and that's actually going to save me a little extra juice. Another thing is you could also play around with the brightness. The brightness is probably the biggest battery killer there is because it takes a lot of juice to power those phones. What I usually do is I have it either on low or I have it on automatic brightness. Now some people argue that it's going to take, automatic brightness is going to use a little extra juice because basically the CPU has to calculate when there's a difference in the lighting and then it's going to adjust the brightness for that. I usually leave it on automatic most of the time and I don't notice too much of an issue. When I start getting low or if it's night time, I have it all the way at the lowest brightness which as you can see is really not a good idea. It's not a good idea for long-term usage and then at night time you could actually see it better and actually what I meant to say is it's not a good idea when there's during day later, anything like that. Another thing that will be very helpful is, let's see over here, is how you charge the battery. How you charge the battery is also going to have a big effect on the battery life. If you're waiting for the battery to actually drain and then you're charging it, so you're waiting for the battery to die and then you're charging it, what you're doing is you're completing these cycles, you're completing these cycles where you're discharging the battery and discharging the battery is actually going to cause, it's basically a chemical reaction with how the lithium ion batteries work and it's going to degrade over time much faster than if you just charge intermittently throughout the day. So if you have a car charger or charging your office, it's better to, once it hits 50% or whatever percent, have it charged. Don't let it get all the way to the end of its life and then start charging it. That is not a good idea because it's actually, the battery is going to start holding less and less charges, capacity is going to be reduced. There are a couple of tricks that we could do, most of which we covered, but before we cover those, I just want to thank our sponsors for making this possible. The first one is MtGox, mtgox.com. They're in online exchange for bitcoins. If you haven't heard of bitcoins, they're a new sort of digital currency. First decentralized currency ever, MtGox is the largest exchange for bitcoins. They have over 90% market share and they now take the euro, the British pound, Australian dollar and Canadian dollar. Obviously, they also take the US dollar as well and also usgoldcoins.com, 1-800 hotcoin. They're our trusted advisor for our investments in gold and silver coins. They also do rare coins, newsmatic coins, and they sort of help take the mystery out of buying gold and silver. If you give them a call, they will help you and they'll see you in the right direction. And Andy Gauss from usgoldcoins, he's actually going to do the real world of money on Wednesdays over here at OnlyOneTV. And then finally, we have mezzigrill.com. Mezzigrill, it's where authentic Mediterranean food meets modern flavor. They're right here in Midtown Manhattan and they're the first ever restaurant, brick and mortar restaurant to accept bitcoins for payment. They also started serving breakfast and they're south, just a couple blocks south of the famous Columbus Circle, right there at 8th Avenue and 55th Street in New York City. If you haven't checked them out in New York City, do yourself a favor and check them out. They have very, very awesome food and you will not be disappointed. So let's get the rest of these tips out there. So we went over reducing or using the power control widget. If you use that, you have proper control over what's running and what isn't running. Most important, syncing. Try to reduce or disable syncing of any apps like the Facebook app, any news apps, like RSS readers or anything of that nature. Be sure that you reduce the frequency of those updates or edit so it's disabled and you control any updates. This way you have more control over the battery life. If possible, disable 3G and 4G when you're not using it. That works quite well. Luring the brightness or using automatic brightness works. What I do at nighttime, I always have at the lowest possible brightness. Sometimes I get a day and a half of use of my phone before I really, really have to charge it because I'm not around the charger. So that makes a big, big difference because the screen is the most power hungry part of your phone. Also, we saw that you can monitor the battery usage. That's what you want to do. You want to check and see what's using the most, you know, the battery percentage. And this way you can deduce, you know, you get a clear picture of what's going on with the phone and what's draining the most. If you're not using an application and you see it show up in the battery usage and you're not using it, uninstall it. Go ahead and uninstall it. If you're going to use it intermittently or you want to use it every once in the blue moon and you don't want it running in the background, there's actually a handy app called AutoStart. And if you run AutoStart, Peter, if you run AutoStart, what it's going to allow you to do, it's going to allow you to look at the states of the phone. And the state is basically, you know, a condition that the phone is in. So it could be standby. It could be when you do something. And basically what you want to do is using AutoStart while it loads up. Basically it's going to let you know what's starting on certain conditions and you could prevent that from happening. So you could prevent, you know, for example, I had never, ever, ever used Wi-Fi calling and it's taking 3% of my battery life, you know, in the averages that it calculated. So over here you could see during certain states that it will show you what's running. And one of these is Wi-Fi calling. And since this is one of those phones that you can't really understand unless you're rooted, which I'm too lazy to do, you could disable it and you could look through every single instance and do that. Now, you do have to be rooted for this. So another advantage of being rooted is that I could just look through every single state and disable every single one as I need to. And then what we could also do is there's also a semi-hidden feature within Wi-Fi called Wi-Fi Timeout. And the way that you get to that is by going to Settings. You're going to go all the way to the top to where it says Wireless and Networks. Then you're going to go onto Wi-Fi Settings. And then, hold on, it should be Advanced. You hit Menu, then Advanced. And over there it has a Wi-Fi sleep policy. And you could set this up. So when the screen turns off, it could be turned off. When it's plugged in, this way it gives you sort of a little more control when you're using Wi-Fi. And then also, you will not believe this, but when you have bad reception, it's actually using more battery power to try to locate a better tower. And it might be a miniscule amount, but over time it could add up to something. So if you're at your office and there's a certain position that has better signal, actually allowing it to stay in that position where it has a better signal, it's not going to try to locate better towers that will save you some battery life as well. Use intermittent charging. So charge every time you get an opportunity. Never let it completely drain. That's absolutely terrible for the battery. And it's going to reduce capacity of the battery over time. So if you're really, really bad at this, what's going to happen is the phone is eventually going to be able to hold a charge for a couple of minutes and nobody wants that. And another big one is Animated Wallpaper. Depending on the animated wallpaper, the difference could be one or two percent battery drainage, which is not much. But if you have those crazy animated wallpapers where there's a lot going on, it's going to be using your CPU, it's sometimes your GPU, which is, you know, your central processing unit and then the graphical processing unit, which most phones have nowadays. So if it's invoking that and it's using those things, it's going to drain your battery a lot, a lot faster. So be sure to either disable Animated Wallpapers completely or use Animated Wallpaper. You know, that's not too bad on battery life. And if you actually follow these and you stop using those task managers, you will notice a very big improvement in your battery life. And, you know, only use the task killers when you actually have to kill a task. It's being stubborn and it needs to be killed. You follow these, you know, you'll notice a big difference. If you root your phone and you install, you know, an aftermarket ROM, they'll have, you know, a little extra cool features like you saw in mine, had a graph over the past five days of what my battery usage was. It has that power control widget that gives me full control over everything that's running on the phone. And those do make a big difference. So until next time, we'll cover some other topics regarding Android, some tips and tricks, review some apps, do all that good stuff. And that's it for now. Hopefully this makes a big difference in, you know, your daily phone usage and you won't have to, you know, curse the phone out every time it dies on you when you really need it. So take care guys and have a good one.