This
tip is one that seems counter-intuitive, but you can save a lot of wear
and tear on your Android phone's battery if you tell it to keep the
Wifi radio turned on and connected while the phone is sleeping. Your
phone needs a lot of juice to keep pinging those cell towers, and even
more to transmit data to and from them. Wifi radios use much less power
because of their design, and they don't have to keep searching for a
better access point. It's the way cellular data communication was
designed, and it's a necessary evil.
But what if
you're spending all day (or all evening) in one place, connected to
Wifi? If you tell your phone to shut off Wifi when idle, it bounces
back to cellular data (be it 2G, 3G, or 4G) and starts sucking down the
electrons again when the screen shuts off. That's no good, and easy to
fix:
- Open the advanced Wifi settings by pressing the menu button, then Settings, Wireless & networks, Wi-Fi settings, and tapping the menu button again. You'll have a choice to either Scan, or go Advanced -- go Advanced.
- Tap the Wi-Fi sleep policy entry, and you'll get a pop up dialog with the choices you see in the picture above. Choose Never.
Now
even when your phone goes into standby mode, you'll stay connected to
Wifi and be able to get mail and messages without turning the cell radio
back on and trouncing your battery life. And for the times when you're
not in an area with a Wifi connection, just shut Wifi off, either
through the menu or with a handy toggle widget. Your battery will thank
you for it.
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