Sunday, May 20, 2007

Battery life

A lot has been written about the battery life of Nokia N95. Some say the battery doesn't even last one day while others are saying it lasts for several days. I'd say, for average user, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. When I got my N95, I first fully charged the battery before starting to use the phone. After the first charge, it run for one day. I have to say I was slightly disappointed to find out that after just one day of use, I had to plug it in for a recharge. On the other hand I knew the phone was new and I had been using it almost all the time to find out what it can do. Usually the batteries start to accept more charge after you have charged it a couple of times. I was hoping it would improve.
Then one day I woke up in the morning to find out that the battery was almost empty. And I was 100% sure that I had charged it the previous evening. What was happening??? It turned out that after charging my phone last night I had used the camera and played System Rush, one of the free games that comes with N95. When I stopped playing, I had not gone through the menu to quit the game, but pressed the red "end call"-button to return to the main menu. In my previous phone that was all I had to do to quit a program I was using. However, in N95 it seems like it leaves the software running in the background.
So, I learned my lesson and close the software I use and from time to time check if I have accidentally left any software running. Now my phones's battery lasts for 2-3 days and that includes phone calls and using the camera and GPS. Not so bad.
Tip of the day: if you want to increase your battery life, make sure that you don't have any unused software running in the background. To find out what programs are running, keep the menu-button (see the picture below) pressed for a second or so and you'll get a list of all open software. There you can easily select the ones you want to close.

1 comment:

Long Nguyen said...

It's just like that on my Nokia 6682 and I think it might be the case for all phones that run with Symbian.

It's quite neat to be able to leave something running in the background like the music player.