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3 Quick Tips Get the Most Battery Life Out of Your LG Optimus V
Save $80 on the Motorola Triumph Android Phone at Virgin Mobile!One thing Apple has going for it is the battery life of its devices. Most Androids’ battery life pales in comparison, allowing for just a few hours of intense streaming, web browsing, etc. This can be really frustrating, especially when we are used to our feature phones of the past getting several days of battery life before we had to charge it.
Here are three quick tips to get the most out of your LG Optimus V’s battery life.
Tip #1- Be a Settings Guru
The first thing I always do when I get a new LG Optimus V or have to reset one, I change the settings to battery friendly settings. You should do the same. The three big rules of saving battery life are less vibration, brightness, and data.
- From home screen, press menu button (far left physical button on front of phone) and select ‘settings’. From there go to ‘Sound’ and turn off ’Haptic Feedback’ (less vibrating means less battery life usage – we are all trained to know that even from feature phones).
- In the ‘Settings’ menu again, select ‘Display’ and turn ‘Brightness’ to its lowest setting. Turn all animations off in the ‘Animation’ menu, and if you want to, turn your ‘Screen Timeout’ to the lowest setting that does not annoy you. I like to add the widget ‘Power Control’ so that I can set the brightness level from the home screen and keep the default at zero. This also allows you to turn Bluetooth, GPS, Wireless, and Sync on or off. It is one of my most used toggle switches!
- Lastly, from ‘Settings’ menu select ‘Accounts & Sync’ and turn off ’Auto-Sync’ if enabled. If you followed my ‘Power Control’ widget suggestion from the last bullet point, then you can turn Sync on and off from the home screen. If you turn off ‘Background Data’ you will also save a lot of battery, but you will also make apps that need a network connection (most of them) pretty much useless — I never turn this off.
- If you use Twidroyd, then you should go to its settings and select ‘Notifications Settings’ and turn off ‘Background Notifications’ because as the warning underneath the setting suggests, it does drain the battery.
Tip #2 – Remember the Little Things
There are lots of little things you can do that add up in the long run.
- Turn off the screen whenever you are done with looking at it instead of letting the screen time out. You can do this by simply pressing the power button once.
- When you do not need it, turn off vibrate notifications.
- Only turn ‘Sync’ on when you want to be checking your email, Facebook, etc. For example, a time I do not need to have the ‘Sync’ on is during most of work because I will not be checking it – so why have it on if all the notifications will be there for no one to read? It is easy enough for me to pull the phone out and ‘Sync’ on demand since it only takes a few seconds anyway, and it saves a ton of battery life. Try it!
- If you are going to a location where service is spotty whether that is outside in the woods or inside Super Wal-Mart or at work in a concrete building, it will save you TONS of battery life if you put your phone in airplane mode (shuts off all wireless service but leaves the phone on). You can do this by holding down the power button and selecting airplane mode from the pop up menu. Most of your battery usage comes from cell standby and searching for network connectivity. Turning this off when your phone would be otherwise in a constant state of searching for network connection (this is a lot of intense work for a phone) will really make a difference – we are talking hours of on time.
- Use Wireless networks to download large things or lots of small things like podcasts instead of your 3G connection. Many applications that are download intensive will have an option to limit downloading to only when the device is connected to a wireless network to prevent the battery life sucking task of downloading over 3G. Same goes for streaming music, video, or podcasts.
Tip #3 – Be Prepared!
My final tip is short and simple, as well as highly recommended because I do it myself. Buy a second or third battery because they are cheap. For both the LG Optimus V and the Samsung Intercept, I’ve bought extra batteries on Ebay at about 10 bucks a piece. It is so easy to swap them out, and then I can do whatever I want on the phone and not worry about it going dead. Remember that you can use batteries for the LG Optimus S/M/T and so on since they are all the same phone just on different networks.
In Review
Remember these three things and you will have a longer battery life.
- Be a Settings Guru
- Remember the Little Things
- Be Prepared
Dana Rock
Owner/Editor of Rock That Mobile - a growing network of blogs about all things mobile.
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I am a complete dummy when it comes to things like this.
Thank you so much for posting this. All of the above is such helpful information that of course is NOT listed in your owner's manual.
I'm sure this will ease my frustrations with the life of my battery.
I recently joined the Android family with my new Virgin Mobile Optimus V. I'm very pleased with it so far. Your tips are quite helpful and very much appreciated. Thank you;)
You are very welcome! Thanks for reading!
Where do I find the "Power Control" widget? And how to I get to the Twidroyd settings to turn off background notifications?
Found the "Power Control" widget, now just need to know about the Twidroyd settings. Thanks!
You will want to set Twidroyd and whatever other app that updates ALOT to update less frequently, as that uses more 3G juice and consequently power. I try to set most things to manual update. If you do not even use Twidroyd, do not even worry about setting any settings for it.