Wednesday, July 8, 2009

What Kills Your Battery? Saving power tips

If your Nokia E63 battery life is lasting less than two days, there is a good chance that your Nokia E63 battery is being used up with inefficient programs or settings.

Monitor your phone First of all, if you would like to contribute some thoughts, do your own survey of how much your applications use up your battery. There is a Battery Usage tool released by Nokia but you will need to be a Forum member to get it or leave your email address below to get a copy emailled to you.

Some other things you can try include:
- Turning off your WIFI scanning
- Shorten the time to standby
- Don't leave useless applications running in the background such as Fring if you are just running it because you can

There will also be a tip regarding users on the 3 network later once it is confirmed to work. Basically it involves removing the automatic connection to Planet 3 which seems to be enabled by default by 3. If you know more about this, leave a comment for your chance to win this month's giveaway.

12 comments:

  1. I don't have any complaints about the battery life. I have bluetooth off and wifi scanning off unless I need them.

    As far as the 'always connected to planet 3' thing, I was quite concerned about this, not because of batter life but because of data costs. My house is a dead spot and I don't get 3 mobile broadband coverage.

    I'm sure you know the relevant setting is Tools->Settings->Connection->Packed Data->Packet Data Connection. You only get 2 options 'When Needed' or 'When available'. Neither of these options is particularly useful or descriptive, but we are stuck with them.

    I use 'When needed' which is the default. What this does in practice is force most apps to ask you each time they want to connect to the internet and this allows you to have the option of blocking connection if it's going to cost you roaming charges. You need to check each app is setup properly for this to happen (all the installed ones are) but some apps need to be configured so that they ask.

    If you use 'When available', you won't get any notification that an app is connecting, and my concern (not proven) is that the danger is roaming charges may apply if you wander out of a coverage area (such as go into a shopping centre) or if you exceed your download limits.

    Either way, it seems, the phone will be 'connected' to planet 3, whether any internet apps are open or not. Even if you manually disconnect the planet 3 connection (and it's quite easy to do) the phone will reconnect by itself. But if you have the settings I suggest above, you won't actually have any traffic charges because you won't be using any data. It's just an open connection for reasons that make no sense to me. But as far as I can tell there isn't anything that can be done about it.

    At first I was quite alarmed, but I've had my first bill now and don't have any surprise usage charges.

    Whether this is actually using battery power I don't know.

    Finally (yeah, long comment, sorry) one general tip for all phones is that the more bars you have, the longer your battery life. Less bars mean the phone is struggling for a connection and will use more energy searching for a better signal or to boost the signal it's got. If you get more bars by leaving the phone on a window sill rather than in your pocket, you can get more battery life that way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. when I say 'all the installed ones' are setup correctly, I me all the pre-installed ones. The nokia email and web browser will ask you which connection to use, as will opera mini and Profmail. But check the settings on any app.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can confirm that the planet 3 trick works.
    1. Put your phone into offline mode.
    2. Duplicate your access point(given option) and it will offer to save tit as planet 3(1). DO this.
    3. Delete your original planet 3 access point.
    4. Rename Planet 3(1) to Planet 3.
    5. Go back online.
    6. Enjoy and have a lovely day.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for that, I thought there had to be more to it because mine was connected all the time no matter what I did (unless offline).

    I've followed your instructions, I'll let you know how it goes.

    There must be some hidden '3' process or something running on the phone to make this connection happen. Either that or there is some secret setting that '3' get to set that is inaccessible to us mere users.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ...okay, 12 hours later and so far so good.

    This trick also seems to make the packed connection close when the web browser quits, which I guess is a good thing.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Matthew, I've also found a dramatic improvement with my battery life since disconnecting the auto-connection to three network.

    ReplyDelete
  7. THANKYOU SO MUCH! You have just saved me a good $50!

    ReplyDelete
  8. tried this and my phone still auto connects what should i do?

    ReplyDelete
  9. this worked for me too. Nice work

    ReplyDelete
  10. Really an interesting post.Thanks for an insightful post.It’s my first visit.I like very much your way of presentation.Keep up the good works and hope you post again soon.
    Commercial Electricity - Compare

    ReplyDelete
  11. Menu

    Settings

    Network

    Network Mode

    GSM

    ReplyDelete
  12. E63 to stop 3G auto connect. Above. It does work perfectly. Alan.

    ReplyDelete

Wrong phone? Follow the Nokia E72 blog

Are you a good person?