Try 10 tips to extend your handset's battery life...

Try these tips
to extend your handset's battery life:

1. See what's sucking the most
juice. Navigate to Settings > Battery to
see an organized breakdown of what's
consuming your phone's battery.
Applications and features will display in
a descending list of battery hogs. If you
see an application you barely use or a
feature you never use, you'll want to
uninstall the app or turn off the feature.

2. Reduce email, Twitter, and Facebook
polling. Set your various messaging
apps to "manual" for the polling or
refresh frequency, just as a test, and
you'll instantly extend your device's
battery life by a significant amount.
Once you see what a difference that
makes, try re-enabling just the most
important ones, and possibly reducing
their polling frequency in the process.

3. Turn unnecessary hardware
radios off. It's great that today's phones
have LTE, NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi, and
Bluetooth, but do you really need all five
activated 24 hours per day? Android
keeps location-based apps resident in
the background, and the constant drain
on your battery will become noticeable,
fast. If your phone has a power control
widget, you can use it to quickly turn on/
off GPS (the largest power drain), NFC,
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. On stock
Android, swipe down to bring up the
Notification bar, and then tap the icon
on the top right corner.

4. Use the extra power saving mode if
you have it. The aforementioned Galaxy
S5 and HTC One (M8) both have Ultra
Power Saving and Extreme Power
Saving modes, respectively, that limits
the phone to texting, phone calls, Web
browsing, and Facebook. This can
squeeze extra hours or even a day of
standby time out of just a few
remaining percentage points of battery.

5. Trim apps running in the
background. From Settings > Apps,
swipe to the left; you'll see a list of apps
that are currently running. Tap on each
one to see what they're for; you can
stop any apps that you don't need
running in the background all of the
time.
6. Dump unnecessary home screen
widgets and live wallpaper. Just
because they're sitting on the home
screen, seemingly inactive, doesn't
mean they're not consuming power.
This goes for widgets that poll status
updates in the background, as well as
ones that just sit there but look pretty
and animated—not to mention animated
live wallpaper. (But don't dump
everything, as part of what makes
Android great are the home screen
customizations; just remove the ones
you don't use.)

7. Turn down the brightness and turn off
Automatic Brightness. It's probably
obvious at this point, but you'll be
surprised by how much this one alone
helps to improve battery life.

8. Update your apps. Applications often
get updated to use less battery power,
so you should make sure your apps are
up to date. Even if you configured the
phone for automatic updates, some
apps still require that you manually
install updates. Check for app updates
in Google Play by hitting the menu key
and going to My Apps.

9. Keep an eye on signal strength. If
you're in an area with poor cellular
coverage, the phone will work harder to
latch onto a strong-enough signal. This
has an adverse effect on battery life.
There's not much you can do about this
one, but keep in mind that this could be
the culprit behind a seemingly weak
battery; it's worth popping the phone
into Airplane mode if you don't need
data or voice calls.

10. Check the reviews. We conduct
battery life tests on every single Android
phone we review. Unsurprisingly, the
results vary widely between handsets,
even on the same network. When
choosing a phone, make sure that real
world talk time is sufficient. You can't
go by what the manufacturer says; we
see variances on the order of several
hours of usage in both directions on a
regular basis.