BlackBerry powered by Android Battery Tips

To help you get the most of out of your smartphone’s battery check out the tip list below!

Part 1 – Battery best practices

• Use the charger that came with your smartphone
• Length of, and frequency of charging
• The result of the smartphone being warm

Part 2 – Optimizing your smartphone’s battery life

• Review your accounts and appgame update settings
• Review your display, and keyboard settings

Part 3 – Battery saver

• What is Battery saver
• How to turn on Battery saver automatically, and manually

Part 4 – Miscellaneous battery tips

• Be mindful of your connectivity settings
• Turn off GPS or location services
• Turn off sync for your Google apps
• Avoid ‘System tuner’ or ‘Task killing’ apps

Part 1 – Battery best practices

When it’s time charge your device here are few things you should know;

Use the charger that came with your smartphone

While you can use a 3rd party charger, it may not provide a sufficient output, thus your smartphone can charge slower than expected. To ensure timely charging we recommend using the charger that came in the box, or a charger that provides a minimum of 1.3A output.

It’s important to add that PRIV, DTEK50 & DTEK60 support Quick Charge 2.0 which means you can charge your smartphone even faster if you purchase a charger that supports this feature.

Length of, and frequency of charging

When recharging your device, the length of time spent on the charger does not matter; you can charge for 2 minutes, or 2 hours. Your smartphone will also turn off the chargers input when it has reached 100% so you don’t have to worry about damaging your battery if the smartphone is left on the charger for 2 days.

Finally, you do not need to ‘manage’ your battery by occasionally draining, and charging the battery from empty. Simply put, just charge when needed, for however long you desire.

The result of the smartphone being warm

When your smartphone is warm you might see higher than normal battery usage. Some activities that can result in higher than normal battery usage due to warmth would be using GPS navigation, with the smartphone in direct sunlight, or recording a lengthy 4K video.

You may also see higher than normal battery usage when using CPU, or GPU intensive apps & games. While this can be frustrating, it’s important to understand that a game with console grade graphics will use more battery life then you would use while composing an email for example.

I should add, it is expected that your smartphone will warm up slightly when charging.

Part 2 – Optimizing your smartphone’s battery life

Review your accounts and appgame update settings

When adding your accounts to a smartphone it’s easy to select the default options, but be mindful of what features your various accounts provide, and have enabled by default.

For example, I have six email accounts and each account offers wireless synchronization of my contacts and calendar in addition to sending and receiving email. Since I use contacts and calendar in one account only, leaving contacts and calendar synchronization enabled on the other five accounts is not a good use of battery life.

To review your account settings, go to the Hub, tap  in the top left corner followed by Settings. Within, tap on each account and review the Sync options.

You should also review the settings of any apps you install so you can better understand how frequently they synchronize data. For example, does your preferred news app need to check for updates every hour, or can it be set to a longer window of time such as 4 hours, or only update when the app is opened?

Spend some time to review your various apps and games as you may be able to make a significant difference to your overall battery life by turning down the frequency some apps check for updates.

Review your display, and keyboard settings

Two device settings you’ll want to review in particular are your display and keyboard settings as some changes here can result in increased battery life.

Display settings (Brightness, Sleep, Ambient display & Life to wake)

1. Tap  Settings followed by Display
2. Verify Adaptive Brightness is enabled
3. Turn down Brightness (optional)
4. Tap Sleep and select 15 seconds or 30 seconds for maximum battery life
5. Turn off Ambient display (optional)
   • If enabled, this feature will wake up your screen when you receive a new notification
6. Turn off Lift to Wake (optional)

Tip: Avoid the use of Live Wallpapers as these will use more battery than a standard wallpaper

Keyboard sound and vibration settings

By default, your keyboard will vibrate and make a sound whenever you are typing. Consider turning these off to save some more battery life.

1. Tap  Settings followed by Language & input
2. Tap BlackBerry Keyboard Settings followed by Key press feedback
3. Turn on, or off the Vibrate and/or Sound switches

Part 3 – Battery saver

What is Battery saver?

This feature reduces your device’s performance and limits features such as vibration, location services, and most background data. As a result, your email, and other apps that rely on syncing might not update unless they are opened when Battery saver mode is enabled. You can tell when Battery Saver is enabled as it will change your device status bar to red instead of the normal color.

How to turn on Battery saver on automatically, and manually

To turn on Battery Saver when needed, swipe down from the top of your display using two fingers and tap on Battery saver. To turn off Battery Saver, repeat these steps, or plug in your device.

You can also set your device to turn on Battery Saver automatically when you have 5% or 15% battery life remaining using the steps below;

1. Using two fingers swipe down from the top of your display
2. Tap  Settings followed by Battery
3. Tap  that appears in the top right corner
4. Tap Battery saver
5. Within Turn on automatically, select Never (default setting), at 5% battery, or at 15% battery

Part 4 – Additional tips

Be mindful of your connectivity settings

If you are in an area of weak coverage, or you don’t need to use your mobile network connection, consider turning on Airplane mode. You should also consider turning off Bluetooth if you are using this feature.

To perform these actions, complete the following;

1. Tap Airplane mode to turn on Airplane mode
2. Tap Wi-Fi to turn on Wi-Fi if Airplane mode was enabled
3. Tap Bluetooth to turn off this feature if it isn’t being used

If you don’t plan on using Wi-Fi for an extended period of time consider turning it off as well to maximize battery life.

Reviewing your mobile network signal strength

To see how mobile network coverage can affect battery life on your device use the History details within the Battery settings screen using the steps below.

1. Tap  Settings followed by Battery
2. Tap on the graph that appears

Within this screen, you can identify if your device is having to use increased battery life to maintain a network signal by reviewing the colors below Cellular network signal.

Review this chart periodically to identify if you are frequently in an area of poor coverage as this can affect your battery life. For example, if this chart shows a lot of green, you are located in an area of good coverage, but if this chart contains a lot of yellow or orange, this would indicate your device is working to find and maintain a network which can result in higher than normal battery usage. If the chart shows red, this indicates that your device did not have a mobile network connection and was trying to find one which will result in increased battery usage.

After reviewing this information, if your radio signal doesn’t appear to be the best consider using Airplane mode, or depending on your wireless service provider’s network coverage, consider temporarily turning off LTE capabilities on your device using the steps below and identifying if battery life improves.

1. Tap  Settings followed by More
2. Tap Cellular Networks followed by Preferred network type
3. Select a setting that doesn’t include LTE

Note: If you adjust these settings make sure you turn them back on when you are in an area of good coverage as LTE provides a much faster mobile network connection.

Turn off GPS or location services

When you need to maximize your battery life, consider switching your device location mode to Battery saving, or turning off Location services completely.

1. Tap  Settings followed by Location
2. To turn off Location services, slide the switch next to Location to Off
3. To change the mode, tap Mode followed by Battery saving

To better understand how apps can leverage location services check out this post from Google.

Turn off sync for your Google apps

If you use a lot of Google services, consider turning off the sync feature for specific Google apps so they do not automatically update the latest information from your Google account in the background.

If you do make any modifications make sure you revert the changes when battery life isn’t a concern.

1. Tap  Settings followed by Accounts
2. Tap on your Google account
3. Use the switch next to selected apps to turn sync off

Avoid ‘System tuner’ or ‘Task killing’ apps

In the past, it was common to install apps that would “kill” any running tasks on your smartphone.
We do not recommend the use of these apps because depending on how you are using them you might be exerting more battery life closing, and reopening things, than you would if you just left things alone.

What you can do however to ‘close’ apps you are not using is use the built in Clear all option that appears if you tap on the  Recents key.

To learn more about the BlackBerry powered by Android smartphone, or to troubleshoot an issue, there are several great options available. Visit the BlackBerry powered by Android support site for access to product documentation, how-to demos, tips and tricks, YouTube videos, support forums, knowledge base articles, Twitter support, and contact information for your region.