Juice Defender helps your Android battery life

My battery life on my phone and tablet have been rather lackluster lately. So I decided to do something about that, and installed Juice Defender on both of them.

Your device sits on wifi even when you aren’t using it, which seems a bit strange. Why do you need a wifi connection when you’re not using the phone? Oh, to check for incoming e-mail. So it wakes the wifi every 15 minutes to poll for e-mail and stuff like that. Sensible.

By default, my phone is perfectly happy to let both the wifi and 4G data connections run. That’s redundant, and wastes battery power. So when I’m in the car, far from any known access point, it disables wifi. And when I’m on wifi, it disables the 4G data connection, which is slower anyway. That saves power. I try to remember to do that on my own, but frequently forget, so it’s nice to automate it. It sounds like a good job for a computer, doesn’t it? Automating a repetitive, hard-to-remember task?

And if I leave the phone sitting overnight on wifi, without the charger, it’s nearly dead by morning, even if it starts out with a full charge. That’s pointless. Juice Defender will help that.

One would think this sort of intelligence would be built into the OS, but it isn’t, at least not yet. Maybe someday.

It’s too early for me to report results–it takes about a week for it to profile your usage and adapt to it–but it did seem to have an immediate effect, especially on my Sero 7 Pro tablet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Juice Defender got me an 45-60 minutes per charge from it, ultimately.

So if you’ve never heard of Juice Defender before, go try it out on one of your Android devices. I think you’ll be happy with what it can do for you. The paid versions give you an even greater degree of control, and for a power user, they seem entirely justifiable. For example, in that overnight scenario, it can just decide not to poll at all when I’m likely to be asleep. And if my usage is different on weekends than during the week, which it probably is, the paid versions will adjust for that.

But even the free version does some very good things for you. It only took 30 minutes for it to convince me of that.

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