Tag Archives: battery

Vox Gives The iPhone Battery Indicator A Minimal, Circular Design

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A lot has been said and written about Apple’s new flat UI for iOS 7, and the emphasis on minimalism in almost all areas of the platform. Many have taken issue with the way app icons look in the update’s beta version, but some have also been appreciative of a few UI elements in iOS 7. The status bar received its chameleon-like characteristics in iOS 6, and has been revamped yet again in iOS 7. The signal bars are now rounded instead of vertical, and the battery indicator is new as well. Vox is not a port of the iOS 7 battery indicator by any means; rather it shows an alternative way the icon could have been redesigned to go with the update’s other minimal features. Rather than replicating an old-style alkaline cell, the Vox indicator is circular and changes its properties to match the current level of your device’s battery. The tweak is pretty unique for iOS, although it is somewhat reminiscent of the circular battery mod that came out for Android quite a while back. Read More

Auto-Change Mac Screen Resolution When Switching Power Sources

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OS X changes the screen brightness when your MacBook is running on battery power but sadly, there isn’t much else you can trigger when the system detects it is no longer plugged into a power outlet. While the aforementioned feature is useful, an ordinary user can’t do anything with it. Now imagine you’re using a Retina MacBook and would like to reduce your screen’s resolution when it’s running on battery power. One way to do it is manually changing it. Though if you would prefer to automate the process, you will need to make a little effort and be prepared for a little setup procedure. We’re going to show you how to change your screen’s resolution using an AppleScript and ControlPlane - a free Mac App that allows you to create contexts for running apps or scripts. This method works in Mountain Lion but may or may not work on older OS X versions. Read More

Last Message For Android Alerts Select Contacts When Battery Is Low

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Despite constant measures taken by mobile device manufacturers regarding battery performance issues, you’ll still find a lot of dissatisfied users out there complaining about irregularities in their devices’ battery behavior. The worst situation arises when you need to stay in touch with your contacts on the move and your device suddenly powers off due to low battery. How often have you been confronted by such a helpless situation where you were unaware of your device’s battery status and consequentially failed to inform your contacts that you might not be able to reply to them for a while just because of your dead mobile battery? How about an app that could automatically determine your device’s alarmingly low battery level in such dire circumstances and send that one final message to your contacts before you can catch up with them again after a fresh recharge. Enter Last Message – a free and customizable Android app that is capable of automatically sending a personalized message to your SMS, mail and social contacts once your device’s battery reaches a user-specified critital minimum. Read More

This Battery Analyzer For iOS Sounds An Alarm When Charging Completes

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Battery life is one of the biggest positives iOS devices enjoy over their competitors. Some of the latest Android phones have pretty decent batteries too, but people mostly associate marathon battery times with iDevices. Regardless, the App Store has more than its fair share of battery managers. A good battery app estimates the usage time of an iPhone for different tasks like making calls, playing games and streaming videos based on the juice you have left. Battery is an app that does all that, but can prove to be more useful than your average iOS battery manager. Wanna know how? Let's find out after the jump. Read More

Increase Your Windows Laptop’s Battery Time By Optimizing Usage

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When laptops came out, they were considered a great way to stay in touch with your work even when you were on the go. They provided you with the complete functionality of a desktop computer, and eliminated the requirement to stay at one place in order to use them. This was made possible due to optimizing the hardware components in such a way that they can be run on battery power. There have been a lot of improvements in terms of the charge a laptop’s battery can hold to provide power to the machine, it still poses a big issue to users. It's fine if you get to charge the laptop battery after every few hours, but if you travel a lot, it’s a safe bet to say that your laptop runs out of battery charge quiet frequently. Today, we have an application for Windows called Battery Optimizer that optimizes your laptop in order to prolong the battery life. All of your system components, both hardware and software, are diagnosed, and suggestions are provided to the user on how to conserve the battery. Moreover, you can create Profiles to quickly apply the required settings to save remaining power. Read More

Battery Compare Lets You Benchmark Your Android Device’s Battery Life Relative To Others

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Limited, poor or fast-fading battery timing is one of the most widely debated issues among smartphone users, and Android is no exception in this regard. In fact, the level of fragmentation in the Android world, the variety of custom ROMs, and the depth of tweaking that Google’s mobile OS allows may result in varying battery timings for two Android users owing exactly the same device. Atop all that, one has to take into consideration the varying mileage that you might be getting from your device’s battery as a result of your normal usage and preferred settings, which are seldom the same for any two users. There is no simple means to obtain detailed battery comparison results, statistics and analysis reports to see how your device fares as compared to other similar devices, or there hasn't been one, until now. Fresh to the Google Play Store, Battery Compare is a free Android battery benchmarking tool that presents you with various filters and settings that you can apply to analyze your device’s battery performance in detail. Using the app, you can have your battery’s drainage recorded for a user-specified time, and then submit it to its servers to obtain detailed results based on comparison with reports submitted by other users from around the world. Read More

Improve Your Windows Phone’s Battery Life With Eco

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Although Windows Phone features a battery saver mode in the Settings menu, most users aren’t really satisfied with it, and claim that it is not very useful in prolonging battery life. You can take matters in your own hands as well, and kill background tasks linked to several apps, but shouldn’t there be some way of automatically entering an effective power-saver mode? Thankfully, you can now use Eco, a new Homebrew app that aims to increase your phone’s battery life considerably, without any help from the user. You will need an interop unlocked device in order to use Eco, but once you have flashed it to your phone, you will not have to do anything else except launching the app once to make it optimize your device’s battery usage. The app lets you manually kill background tasks, or temporarily disable your Windows Phone's sensors while it is not in use. Read More

Screensaver +: Add iPhone Lockscreen Like Screensaver To Mac [Paid]

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CRT monitors are getting rare, and even if they stick around for a few more years, the technology itself has improved. Back when it was still new, we used screensavers to avoid phosphor burn-in. Today, screensavers are little more than a way of putting animated cuteness on our screens when we’re away. Screensaver + is a Mac app that costs $1.99, and gives you a more functional screensaver. It mimics the iPhone lockscreen and lets you view which network you’re connected to, the day and date, time and battery status of your Mac. Where the iPhone lockscreen lets you unlock your phone by sliding your finger across it, this app adds a button that you can click to unlock your Mac. You can choose any image to display as the screensaver, and impose a size limit on the images that can be used. Read More

Battery Manager Pro: Improve iPhone Battery Life & Track Battery Usage

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Battery Manager Pro is one of the more popular battery apps for iOS, and has quite a lot of users. The app claims to be the ultimate battery-related app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and we have to admit, it does cover just about every aspect of battery usage you could hope to handle. The app is not new in the App Store by any means, but the big news about it, is that it recently went free for a limited time. Read on to find out what makes Battery Manager Pro such a useful app. Read More

Battery Status: Live Tile For Battery Percentage & History [WP7 Homebrew]

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Since Nodo, Windows Phone 7 users have looked for ways to view the exact remaining battery percentage of their devices. Before Mango, that was only possible via the Diagnostics Menu, but WP7’s fruity update brought that functionality to the OS and now you can view the battery status in the battery saver menu in Settings. However, if you're still looking for something more, try Battery Status, a homebrew app available for all unlocked Mango devices. It can be a little annoying having to go deep into the Settings menu just to see the remaining battery of your phone, and it is not as convenient as being able to see the percentage on your Start screen. This app shows the current and past battery status of your device and comes with live tile support. Read More

How To Prevent Your Laptop From Overheating [Windows 7]

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A few months back, I bought a new Core i3 laptop, hoping to run more resource intensive applications and games with better performance. While most of the applications seem to run without any issues, I have been dealing with a few thermal heating issues while playing games or running encoding tasks. For some odd reason, even reducing the affinity of the application or the game, does not eliminate the heating problem. I even bought a cooling pad, and tried switching to lower graphic options, but that, too, has resulted in minimum heat reduction. After going through many methods of reducing system heat up, it appears that there is only one true method that may be more effective than others (courtesy of our former editor, Ghaus Iftikhar), i.e., to reduce the maximum processor state from the laptop’s power settings. In this post, we will tell you how to prevent your system from heating up by adjusting the power options for your processor state. This tip might come in handy not just for gamers and people who wish to run resource intensive application in the wake of overheating laptops, but also if, for some reason, you are unable to return a laptop with a heating issues (perhaps due to warranty constraints), or are dealing with an old laptop, which won't take the brunt any more. Read More

Get Circular Battery Percentage Mod On AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II [Guide]

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Samsung Galaxy S II [S2] is perhaps the best Android phone that is now available throughout the globe. It is pretty astonishing that this beauty was released in the US only a month back. Since the time of this phone’s US release, users have been either converting to Sprint for their Epic 4G Touch or moving to AT&T for their version of Samsung Galaxy S II. For those who don’t know, Samsung Galaxy S II is an extremely thing, stylish Android phone that comes with a 4.3 Inch display and a dual core processor on board. Apart from general Android users and fans, this phone has also managed to capture a whole lot of developer attention and now there are dedicated development, modding and hacking threads for this phone on different Android portals, forums and blogs.

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NoMoarPowah! – Alternate Charging Screen For Rooted Samsung Android Devices

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It seems old Chainfire isn’t going to run out of original ideas any time soon. The veteran Android developer’s latest venture into the Android Market is as unique (both in name and functionality) as his other endeavors (such as Chainfire3D). The app is called NoMoarPowah! and its purpose is to replace the default charging screen of your Samsung device with a more practical one. That is, it replaces the graphic that appears while your phone is being charged while powered off with an interface that displays the current time and battery percentage, allows you to reboot your device with a single tap or set it to reboot once the battery is fully charged. And that’s not all. From within the app, you can customize the charging screen to wake your device at a time of your choice or, if the battery level is critically low, when said level reaches 15%. The app works only for selective Samsung Android Devices with root access. Read More

PwrDrain Shows Laptop Battery Power Drainage In Real Time

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PwrDrain is a windows gadget which is quite different from common power meters. Unlike normal power meters, it displays the current power drainage in real time. This allows identifying those applications which may drain more batter power from your laptop. When you start using a power intensive application or process, you are alerted when an increase in power consumption is detected. Read More

How To Fix Battery Drain Issue On A Rooted Android Device

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On several Android forums around the web, Android users have been regularly reporting rapidly draining batteries after flashing custom ROMs (such as Cyanogenmod 7, MIUI and other lesser known ROMs) to their devices. As you would already know, numerous factors contribute towards hogging and draining your limited battery resources, but on the positive side, there are certain effective methods that can help you with rectifying said issue, and get the maximum life out of your Android's battery. In what follows, we will provide you with a step-by-step solution to said problem. Read More

How To Squeeze More Battery Life Out Of Advent Vega

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Although the Advent Vega boasts a very durable battery life, if you want to squeeze even more out of it, you can do so simply by disabling the phone service component of Android OS as this tablet does not have a phone radio. This should improve the battery life significantly as the phone service runs all the time, even when the device is in standby mode. Read More

Disable HSPA HSDPA HSUPA For Better Battery Life On Samsung Galaxy S

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For Samsung Galaxy S GT-I9000 Android phone, one of the biggest drawbacks is the poor battery life. While there are many tips for improving that, one of the best ones is lessening the load on data consumption. Battery gets hit the most when using a data connection, and the stronger the data connection, the more the battery drain. Hence, one of the methods can be disabling HSPA/HSDPA/HSUPA and use 3G instead, which may not be as speedy but certainly consumes a lot less battery. Read More

The Basic Guide To Saving Your Android Phone’s Battery Life

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We install a number of apps on our Android devices for different purposes. Apps differ when it comes to issues such as accessibility to data connectivity and battery consumption. A number of features available on your device can also cause the battery to drain quickly. To stay on the safe side, users have to manage their phone battery. Some do it by carrying charger at all times, and some do it intelligently. In this article we will look at some of those great basic ways in which you can save battery and make your phone last longer throughout the day. Read More

Complete Android Analysis With Android System Info

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There are number of apps out in the Market for analyzing the Android system. Users end up downloading number of apps for different sort of purposes including but not limited to system usage, running tasks and apps, generating logs etc. Android System Info (ASI), gives user complete technical analysis regarding their device. It displays system and battery usage, managing tasks and apps, and logs based on counts and events. Even though you see your device as only a calling, texting and/or socializing tool, there can be times where your device might stop responding in a desirable manner, therefore, having a tool, such as Android System Info, can prove to be a lifesaver in all such scenarios. If nothing else, the app can help you with identifying the problematic area of your device, even if you aren't a geek. Read More

Increase Laptop Battery Performance With Aerofoil [Windows]

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As a laptop ages, its battery begins to weaken. No matter how well you take care of it, no matter what steps you take, the battery is bound to weaken because that’s how they are built. Hence the importance of power management on such a machine increases perhaps twice as much as it would on a new one. Windows 7 comes with default battery profiles, but they lack automation. This discrepancy is overcome by using a small program Aerofoil, which performs automatic power management functions for your laptop. Read More