12 Ways to extend Blackberry battery life

I don’t have a Blackberry, I use Nokia E71.  But my Boss uses it. A year back he moved to Blackberry Bold from Apple iPhone and still loves it. I think Blackberry is good for business people, with lots of stuffs; it’s really a cool gadget, carrying a small office in your pocket. Blackberry is pretty much good in terms of battery life. But if you are an avid user, you may find yourself lost in dead battery zone before the day is end because of your old habit, and what about if you forget to carry the charger while travelling?

Here, I want to share some basic tips to improve your Blackberry battery life.

12 Easy ways to extend Blackberry battery life.

1. Minimize Backlight Brightness:

Things look better in bright light. You may be using a fair amount of bright light for your Smartphone screen. However, the brighter backlight will juice out the battery life. When you are in need, the first thing you should control is the backlight brightness. Minimize the backlight brightness as possible.

• Backlight Brightness: Go to Options > Display Screen > Scroll down to Backlight Brightness > Chose the lowest brightness number.

2. Backlight Timeout: Timeout is the duration which your phone takes to dim (time out) before the last touch or usage of a key. It is from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. Make it shortest.

• Backlight Timeout: Go to Options > Screen Display > Scroll down to Backlight Timeout > Chose the lowest backlight timeout (in seconds).

3. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Connections:

It is a quick way to save some battery life. When you are not using, turn off all Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. Only turn on your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options when you need to use internet or other services. You can do it with ‘Manage Connections’ on your home screen.

4. Move to 2G from 3G:

You may be using faster 3G connections. But in a call for battery life move on to slow 2G connection.

5. Notification Alerts and Profiles: Observe your notification alerts style like vibration, sound etc for incoming calls and messages. Suppose, you have set a profile which makes your phone to vibrate 3 times and then ringing tone comes, it will drain out the battery life. Set a short ringtone with no vibration. Also turn off the keypad tones. It will save a good amount of battery life.

6. Use apps wisely: When you move from one application to another, there are some apps which run in background, such as Music and Browser app which claims losses in battery life. You should also know what kind of power a specific application needs. For example, using Goole Maps Mobile Application needs a fair amount of battery power. Hence avoid power hungry apps. Even though there are some applications which uses battery life even when you are not using them, like a mobile RSS reader for Blackberry. Therefore, in battery power shortage use mobile applications on your Blackberry phone wisely and turn off all applications when you are not using.

7. Wisely select email account: It might be you have configured two or more email accounts in your blackberry phone. It may be with Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. Every time you get an email, your overall battery life weakens a little. Chose only relevant emails to save and extend battery life.

8. Turn off Flash of Camera:

Having a photo or two with flash will certainly not crash your battery life. But using repeatedly will definitely will take a lot. If you need more photo shots and also want to save battery life, turn off the flash.

• Go to Camera app by Camera icon > Go to Options > Set default flash setting to ‘no’. To turn it on just reverse the steps.

9. Wisely select email account: It might be you have configured two or more email accounts in your blackberry phone. It may be with Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. Every time you get an email, your overall battery life weakens a little. Chose only relevant emails to save and extend battery life.

10. Keep battery clean: Always keep your Blackberry batter clean. Keeping battery connections clean extends the battery life. Over time dust and other particles come to metal points of the battery which connects with hardware. This may slow down the transfer of power. Every few month, clean metal contacts of your battery with cotton or dry cloth.

11. Automatically turn off:

Email notifications, message alerts always use some energy of your Blackberry phone. So it is better to turn off your Blackberry when you are not using for a extended period of time. For example during sleep when you don’t need to use your Blackberry and can set it to turn off automatically. When you turn on your Blackberry it automatically updates the date your have received in this period of time.

12. Set your Blackberry to standby mode: Standby Mode save power by freezing keyboard and deactivating display. Still you receive message, calls and other motivations as usual. In most Blackberry phones you can do it by simply pressing the ‘Mute’ key for some time.