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What’s worse than a dead phone? One that takes too long to charge! This has certainly happened to most of us before: you’re rushing out of the door and you happen to see there’s just 5% left of battery! Here are some tips on how you can get your Android phone to charge faster!
The more we do on our phones, the more lost we are without them – but dropping, mislaying or losing your phone needn’t be the end of the world. There are several ways to find a lost Android phone, and if the worst happens it’s possible to lock it and / or wipe it too.
The Nexus 5 from Google and hardware partner LG Electronics is a great value, with a starting price of $349 for 16GB, and with a 4.95-inch full HD display. Unfortunately, that 1080p display and quad-core processor can sometimes result in less-than-stellar battery life.
If your Nexus 5 is having battery problems, here are a few more ways to help it last longer. But first, make sure to check out our first list of ways to improve your Nexus 5’s battery life.
Then, make sure you have determined the culprit. Go to Settings > About Phone > Battery Use to see what apps or services are causing the problem.
As one helpful reader pointed out in our first list of Nexus 5 battery fixes, enabling Android Runtime will improve battery life. This is because ART fundamentally changes the process of how apps are opened.
ART will cause apps to take up 10 to 20 percent more space on your on-board storage, but allow them to open faster. Also, thanks to the diminished processing power it requires to open app, enabling ART will increase your battery life as well.
Remember that Google does not consider the Android Runtime as ready for the masses, which is why it is not enabled by default on the Nexus 5. Also, please note that the International Business Times is not responsible for any damage that tinkering with your phone may cause.
To enable ART on your Nexus 5: Settings > About Phone, then tap “Build Number” 7 times. Then back out and go into the new settings sub-menu that appears, Developer Options, and select ART instead of the Dalvik Runtime.
Most Nexus 5 users have found that the main feature affecting battery life on the Nexus 5 is its big, beautiful display. Go into Settings > Display > Sleep and reduce the time before your display automatically dims to as low as you are comfortable with – 30 seconds for best results. It is also a good practice to press the power button when you are not using your Nexus 5, instead of waiting for the phone to sleep automatically.
As much of a hassle as it can be on a phone you have adjusted perfectly to your liking, if you received an over-the-air update from Google that bumped your Nexus 5 to Android 4.4 KitKat or 4.4.1 to the newest build of Android 4.4.2, it might be a good idea to do a factory restore.
Taking the OTA update caused bugs for some users, and may cause your Nexus 5 to incorrectly report how much battery life it has remaining. Be forewarned that a factory restore will erase everything on your phone, including the on-board storage, so make sure your photos have been backed up with Google Plus beforehand.
To do a factory restore, navigate to Settings > Backup & reset > Factory data reset to restore your Nexus 5 to factory-shipped freshness. Some users have also reported that a Nexus 5 factory reset fixed GPS issues and other bugs in addition to improving battery life.
In addition to using your GPS, Android collects location data from nearby Wi-Fi routers. Scanning for Wi-Fi this way uses up battery life on your Nexus 5 (or any Android device), but allows Google to charge more money for advertising based on your location.
To turn off location reporting, go into Settings > Location > Google Location Reporting and turn both Location Reporting and Location History off. Please note that this will also cause Find My Android to no longer be able to track your Nexus 5 should it be stolen or misplaced, so use this tip at your own discretion.
When a smartphone is in a bad coverage area, it uses up a lot of battery power as it attempts to scan the area for signal. If you are in an area where you get poor or no connection anyways, like traveling underground on a subway, put your Nexus 5 in Airplane Mode to save your battery.
Some other good ways to improve battery life include turning off your Nexus 5’s haptic feedback. It uses up battery to run the haptic motor every time you tap, so turn this feature off for longer life.
Let the author know on Twitter @sumationofknowledge or in the comments below if you have a battery tip of your own, and make sure to check out the first 5 Battery Tips for the Nexus 5.
With its iPhone 6 and iOS 8, Apple has introduced a few features that have been available on Android smartphones for quite some time.
For example, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will be the company’s first smartphones to come with near field communication (NFC) — a technology that lets phones talk to one another via a short-range radio.
This means you can exchange data and make payments by simply tapping your iPhone against another compatible device.
Still, you can still do a lot of things with Android phones that you can’t with the iPhone.
Many Android phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and LG G3, come with a removeable back — which means you can take out the battery. This is especially helpful if you find your phone dying quicker than expected. With some Android phones, you can simply pop off the back, take out the battery, and put a new one in when your phone is dead. The iPhone relies on a single rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which can be removed or replaced only by Apple technicians.
Several Android manufacturers layer their software over the plain version of Android, often adding their own features. On Samsung and LG phones, for example, you can open more than one app at a time and run them alongside one another. On LG phones, you can even move these apps around in separate windows, change the transparency of those windows, and resize them, as shown in the screenshot to the right.
Every camera manufacturer has its own brand of image stabilisation system. Most use mechanisms inside the lens, where gyroscopic sensors detect any camera movement and drive motors that shift an internal lens element to correct it. The trouble is, according to Sony, that these only counteract certain types of movement, namely pitch and yaw.
This is where you inadvertently twist the camera sideways or in an up-down direction as you take the picture. The movements may be so tiny you don’t notice, but they can be enough to blur the fine detail in your pictures. This is typical of shots taken with telephoto lenses – actually, it affects all lenses, but telephotos magnify the blur and make it more obvious.
But these aren’t the only movements that can cause blur. High-magnification images, particularly macro shots, are often spoiled by lateral and vertical movements, or x/y shifts, during the exposure. Sony’s image stabiliser can correct these too.
The fifth axis of correction is ‘roll’, which is an unintended circular movement that’s most obvious in video footage but can affect still images too, especially with slower handheld exposures at night, for example. You’ll see it when a horizon that should have been straight is actually slightly skewed.
A full frame DSLR is the dream camera for most photography enthusiasts. You get double the sensor size of a regular APS-C DSLR and this gives super-smooth tonality, low noise and great depth of field effects.
You can get all the latest camera reviews and news on the Techradar Camera Channel home page, but you might have missed the Nikon D610 review and the Canon 6D review because the Nikon was launched a year ago and the Canon is two years old. This means both are well into their product life cycle, but this is often the best time to buy expensive technology – as the prices prove, because both cameras are now 30% cheaper than when they were launched.
Whether for a birthday, hunting for an original gift, or when your friends or family gets a new Android smartphone or tablet for the Christmas holidays, a cool idea is to give the gift of an Android app. This could also be something cool to give your kids, after you’ve bought them their first Android phone.
If you got a shiny new smartphone or tablet (perhaps you treated yourself or received it as a gift), you probably want to start playing with it immediately. But first of all it must be set up, and not everyone knows how with Android. In this beginners article, we’ll explain step-by-step how to set up your new smartphone. You’ll see: it’s easy!
Some Google Play apps have a price tag, which means that they are sometimes better developed, but also void (or almost) of annoying ads that invade your smartphone or tablet’s screen. With Google, it’s really easy to buy apps, but the first time might be a little tricky for newbies to Android and the smartphone world. For those who need that extra help, here is our Android for Beginners tutorial on how to buy paid apps from the Google Play Store.
The second generation of the Moto G (2014) comes packed with a bunch of features that were present in the original Moto G and also brings with it a few tricks up its sleeves. We’ve selected some of our most interesting tips, most frequently asked questions, and more that will help you adapt to your brand new Moto G.
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