Long lasting batteries

In my last post I sort of raved about the Blackberry Playbook, and I do still believe it's a fantastic device. In fact, I'm typing on it right now.

My Blackberry phone, though, while very functional, is not quite as stellar. In particular, the battery life was pretty dismal. And I'm not alone in this regard. One of best friends also has a Blackberry, and has to charge it every night. They seem to spend as much time plugged in as they do plugged out.

Lucky for me, then (and you, if you own a BB) I found an article on the net that offered some suggestions to improve battery. And it really does work.

So, if you have a BB and don't want to charge it all the time, here's what you do:

1. Set your screen brightness to 50%. Trust me, it's still enough to see clearly,

2. Turn off the option to automatically dim backlight - this uses extra CPU, hence extra battery power.

3. Uninstall those pointless apps you downloaded for free. Seeriously, are you even using them? All they do is take up memory and battery power.

4. Hold in your menu key on the main screen to see what apps are running in the background. Close any you don't need. Whatsapp is notoriously bad at killing battery life behind the scenes.

5. Tell your social media not to update every 15 minutes. As a default apps like Twitter and Facebook want to scan for updates every few minutes. Changing this to every few hours (or even only when you open the app) will drastically improve battery life. I know you're probably thinking: how will I survive without regular social updates! But I'm willing to bet you probably open up Facebook and Twitter regularly anyway, despite the updates. When you open it up, you'll see your updates.

I've set Facebook to update every 3 hours and Twitter to update only when I open the app. Coupled with the backlight mentioned in points 1 and 2, and the lack of stupid apps taking up memory, my battery life has literally doubled. That means I charge it half much.

If you don't own a BB there's no hope for you anyway so sorry, no help offered here ;-)

Holidays are upon me, so I'll be posting some music related tutorial-like material over the next few weeks.

Stay safe people!