Smartphones are one of the greatest things to happen in technology in the last 20 years, but the biggest problem is powering them. If you're a heavy user, then you will no doubt have had problems where the phone is out of juice long before the end of the day.
Companies like Samsung have proved that you can eke a lot more juice out of a phone if you shut down many of the features. So its ultra battery saving mode will allow the phone to last 24 hours on 10% charge. It does this by suspending email downloads, turning the screen black and white and cutting down the number of apps running.
That's great if you have a Samsung phone that supports that - but if you don't, then what can you do?
1. Stop using it
The sad truth is that the screen is the biggest drain on a battery. So if you're running out of juice, then you need to stop looking at the phone unless it's absolutely essential. That's a pretty terrible compromise, but you could perhaps ration yourself to certain tasks on your phone. Even so, the whole point of these devices is supposed to be that they replace a load of other things.
If you need to use your phone a bit more, then make sure you turn off the auto brightness feature, and set the display to the lowest possible brightness. At night, minimum brightness will probably be enough, but the lower you keep the screen inactive, the longer you should get out of your battery.
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2. Data drains
If you need to drag the maximum life out of your phone, then one option is to turn off data transfer over 4G/3G. This is the second biggest draw on battery life on a phone, and by stopping data from syncing, you're also stopping apps like Facebook, Twitter and email from checking for new messages and content in the background.
You can always turn data back on again if you need to get up to speed on what's happening, and then switch it off once you've done that.
3. Email is thirsty work
Many people will have two or three email accounts syncing on their phone. Push mail - where your phone tells you about each email as it arrives - is a huge drain on power, so if you're trying to conserve battery, this is something to disable.
On Android, you can set various email apps to sync on either a time-based basis, via push or in some cases manually, which means you have to open the app and refresh to see new mail. This is a good way to keep battery consumption low.
4. GPS and Bluetooth
With modern handsets, especially those that use Bluetooth Low Energy, you shouldn't need to worry about this wireless technology too much. Increasingly with smartwatches, it's pretty essential to leave Bluetooth enabled. GPS on the other hand can cause some problems with battery life, but this is harder to resolve than just switching GPS off.
For example, if you use Google Maps, it will drain your battery at a somewhat alarming rate. There are options, though. For example, you can cut down the accuracy of location services, and in so doing save power. The problem is that in Maps some features like turn-by-turn navigation won't work properly unless you have the highest accuracy setting enabled.
A lot of apps such as Twitter and Facebook also want location data. If you want to make some battery savings, just deny them access to location services. In Android it's a bit hard to control how apps use the battery - iOS makes restricting these features a bit easier. Hopefully Google will improve things in the future, but for now, keeping your Android phone powered-up can be something of a mission.
5. Keep your phone off overnight
Any Android phone left on overnight will probably spend a lot of power checking on various things at regular intervals. So if you're on a camping trip or out in the wild, make sure you switch it off at night to stop your phone from wasting juice while you're asleep.
And if all else fails...
If you get desperate, then you can always do one of two things - either get a spare battery if your phone allows you to swap yours, or invest in an external battery pack for times when you need a bit more juice, and can't get to a wall socket.
