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Battery Life

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Here are three quick tips to get the most out of your Motorola Triumph’s battery life.

Tip #1- Be a Settings Guru

The first thing I always do when I get a new phone or have to reset one is 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.

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. The Motorola Triumph will be no different. 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.