How To Save Battery On Your Motorola Droid

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Since I got a Motorola Droid last month, like many other Doird’s owners, I’ve been fighting against its very short battery life. The first days of usage I had to charge it by lunch time, something very annoying and not really suitable with an heavy business usage.

Since then, I read a lot of forums and articles online trying to find a definitive solution to this issue. I was also thinking of buying this ugly and bulky battery to replace the original one…but I was convinced there could have been a much better alternative.

OS Update

First of all, the improvement brought by the 2.0.1 Android OS update was huge and the battery started lasting way, way longer than before (the Droid shipped with 2.0), roughly 30% more. While it was an important step ahead, it was not enough.

Multitasking

After digging more into the problem, I realized that the main cause of the short battery life was one of the features that Android fans usually mention as the main advantage against the iPhone: multitasking. Well, that’s actually the MAIN cause of battery life’s drop. During the startup, the system loads lots of apps, even many apps you will never use. Moreover, all the other apps you use often usually keep working also when you switch to another app and rarely shut down.

The solution

The main solution to the problem is made of two little apps: Advanced Task Killer and Automatic Task Killer. The former lets you quickly kill the apps that you are not longer using and you can do that through a simple click. The latter, instead, lets you choose the apps you want to be shut down automatically when the phone is idle (i.e. when the screen is automatically turned off). You may want to leave out apps like Google Maps, Evernote (if you use it) or Remember the Milk, for example, that you are likely to use during meetings or looking for a place, so it’s better you keep the full control over them and decide when they have to be quitted.

Result

After having installed and configured the two apps mentioned above, the results are IMPRESSIVE. I can easily get 16-17 hours of battery life with heavy usage, lots of phone calls, twitter, facebook, many hours of Wifi on and not renouncing to things like automatic brightness setup and the complete set of Android animations during screen transitions. Once I turned 3G off, I got 19 hours…

You can easily find those apps on Android Market. What’s your experience?

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• Enabling USB Host mode on the Motorola Droid (makezine.com)
• Motorola Droid gets official multitouch support — in Google Maps, anyway (engadget.com)

Tagged as: Android, battery life, motorola droid