Nextbit’s marquee feature for the Robin intelligently manages storage by backing it up to the cloud for easy access and restore. Now a new version of Nextbit OS launching in Q4 hopes to deliver significantly longer battery life through similar intelligence too.
The battle of mobile platforms never ends, and the discussion can definitely get annoying at a certain point. But with each and every innovation that Apple, Google, Samsung, LG, and others bring to the table every year, there’s always something new to consider. Today, we saw the introduction of Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0, and — of course — the first thing that came to mind was this question: “What does this mean for the iPhone?” In this case, it’s a pretty hilarious comparison. When it comes to battery life and charging speed, Android is — no question about it — in the lead…
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[Update: The company now has a blog post up about the new channel. It adds that they’ve also made some new actions for the general Android Device Channel including one to mute your phone when you plug it in and one to get directions to work every weekday morning (weird), to name just two. The company’s Do series of apps (collection here) have received some small updates including unlimited action buttons and floating buttons that follow you everywhere on your phone, like Facebook’s floating chat heads.]
IFTTT stands for “If this, then that” and is a popular service for automating your digital life and stitching together all the disparate, disconnected apps and services you may use on a daily basis. Now the company has released a bunch of new native Android actions that will automate the management and preservation of your device’s battery life.
One of the major improvements found in Android M and highlighted during Google’s I/O developer conference was two new features meant to significantly increase standby times of smartphones running the OS over previous versions, and now we have some more numbers that should make the differences concrete.
For the uninitiated, the two new features meant to tackle battery life are Doze and App Standby. Doze uses what Google calls “significant” motion detection to determine when a device has been left unattended for an extended period of time, and when it does find that your device is idle, backs off background activity (like apps syncing data) to go into a deeper state of sleep and drink less power in standby.
Google has been working with Adobe to improve battery life drain caused by Flash and today flipped the switch on a new Chrome feature that does exactly that. The new feature aims to detect Flash on a webpage that is actually important to the main content and “intelligently pause content” that isn’t as important. The result is to hopefully make the web experience with Flash more power efficient to improve battery life on your laptop. Here’s how it works:
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Following rumors that ASUS could look to release a non-Android Wear device and reports of delays for its next-generation smartwatch, today the company confirmed that the new Asus ZenWatch will arrive early in Q3 and will indeed be running Android.
The news comes from the focustaiwan.tw news channel, which reports the company’s CEO confirmed plans are still on track for the next-gen Asus ZenWatch powered by Android Wear:
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If you’re flying (back) to the U.S. from overseas, make sure that all your electronic devices have enough juice left to power-up when you reach airport security, otherwise you won’t be allowed to take them on board due to a new TSA requirement.
The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday that it was requiring certain overseas airports flying directly to U.S. airports to increase security checks on electronic items in response to concerns about new al-Qaida attempts to use them as disguise for bombs.
While the focus appears to be on smartphones, it’s also possible that passengers will be required to power-up tablets and laptops also. Devices that won’t power-up will not be allowed on board, and passengers carrying these devices may be subject to additional screening.
The TSA has not revealed which airports are subject to the new requirements, but London’s Heathrow is known to be one of them.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzMUTrTYD9s]
As Samsung has done with past TV commercials for its flagship Galaxy S5, its latest ad for the device again takes the iPhone head-on. The new ad, titled “Wall Hugger”, focuses on mocking the iPhone’s battery life while showing off the S5’s Ultra Power Saving Mode and removable battery features. And in usual Samsung-fashion, it also borrows a line from comments Blackberry executive John Chen made back in March…
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Today towards the end of its keynote address previewing its upcoming Android L release, Google announced software enhancements coming in the release that will vastly improve battery life. Dubbed “Project Volta”, Google has new tools for both developers and users that will increase battery life and optimize software on devices to be more efficient.
Google showed off a new tool called Battery Historian that will help quickly identify a system task that might be draining battery. The company said it’s already been using the tool to make Google Apps more efficient and hopes it will improve instrumentation of battery data for all. It also has a new Jobshceduler API that will allow a device to better allocate system tasks when users might be low on battery.
Lastly, Google has a new Battery Saver mode that allows things like clocking down CPU, turning off background data, and other tasks that are hard on battery life. The feature can be triggered manually or configured to come on when battery is low. Google said the Battery Saver can offer up to an extra 90 minutes of usage on a Nexus 5 for a typical day.
It looks like Android 4.4.3 will be starting to roll out to devices running KitKat soon, according to Phandroid. The update is said to include a fix for a camera-related bug that can cause the phone’s battery to drain faster than usual. The new version reportedly has a build number of KTU72B.
We’ve also spotted an increasing number of devices running 4.4.3 visiting 9to5Google over the past few days, so it’s safe to say this update is coming quite soon.
Skype has today had updated its Android app with a handful of new features and bug fixes. In a blog post, Skype explains that it was been working diligently over the last year to greatly improve the battery with the app, and that today’s update finally does so. The update introduces “aggressive battery savings” that will make the app have little to no effect on your device’s battery life.
The company says that it in order to improve battery life, it had to completely transform the way the Skype technology works and that this transformation is not entirely complete yet. One instance of this is that for time being, Skype has turned off instant notifications of messages in group chats. The company hopes to release another update soon that re-enable them with little battery impact. For now, however, you can enable them by going to Settings > Notifications > and choosing the “Sync group messages in the background” box. Although, this will impact your battery life.
The update also improves stability on KitKat, in addition to fixing audio and video calling on tablets without BlueTooth.
- Workaround for the KitKat bug which caused a runaway process when the camera was synced in the background.
- Fix for audio and video calling on tablets that do not have Bluetooth.
- Now lists your Windows Live Messenger contacts in the Skype (default) view, not just the All contacts view.
The update is available on the Play Store now and bumps the app to version 4.7.
Image: malaysiaitfair.com.my
A preview of Android 4.3 by Pocketnow suggests huge improvements to battery-life, with the site reporting 25 hours of heavy usage.
On Android 4.2 I can typically expect 4-6 hours of use before I need to recharge. As a reminder, I use my phones quite a bit more than the average user, so my battery life is expectedly lower than what most should expect to get. On Android 4.3, without changing my usage habits, I was surprised to see the phone last all day, all evening, and still had charge enough to get me to work the next morning. I was able to eek out 25+ hours and still had 1% battery life remaining. That’s impressive! …
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Gizmodo pointed us to some research carried out by someone who must be the poster child for having too much time on your hands: he decided to measure the amount of power a laptop uses for each tab open in a browser. The answer, in case you were curious, is 0.19 watts per tab in Safari or Chrome and 0.16 watts in Firefox.
There is some point to it, though: the experiment showed that having 100 tabs open reduces battery-life by around an hour. While I doubt that many of us have quite that many tabs open at any one time, it does suggest that when you’re trying to eek out as much usage as you can from a battery, closing unnecessary tabs will buy you at least a little more time.
Which?, a highly-regarded UK consumer research organization, found the Samsung S4 to be both the fastest smartphone on the market, and the one offering the best battery-life – a pretty impressive combination.
Using the industry-standard Geekbench 2 software, the S4 comfortably came out on top with a score of 3,188 against the 2,798 of the second-placed HTC One. Graphics for both speed and battery-life after the break …
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With Samsung’s official unveiling of its next flagship smartphone earlier this month, we are now getting some insight into the Galaxy S III’s battery life courtesy of GSM Arena. The publication took the I9300 Galaxy S III, and its 2100 mAh battery, and put it to the test in a number of benchmarks. The results included: 10 hours and 20 minutes of continuous talk time with the display off; 5 hours and 17 minutes of web browsing; and, over 10 hours of continuous video playback. As you can see from the images of the results above, the S III was just behind Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx on video playback and talk time. However, web browsing puts it at No. 14 behind competitors thanks to its AMOLED display.
The report explained that with the device’s stand-by endurance rating of 43h, you would “need to charge the monstrous smartphone once every 43 hours if you do an hour of 3G talking, video playback and web browsing per day.”
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