It has happened to us all, you’re on the road and suddenly realize that you’ve forgotten to charge your BlackBerry and are expecting a big email from work. Looks like it’s time to slim down on features and start saving some juice for what you really need. I’m going to give you a small list of things I’ve personally tried on my Bold 9000.
- Stop all unnecesarry apps from running in the background. This is a huge power hog, keeping Twitter, Gmail and messengers (oh and let’s not forget the resource whore Vigo) open in the background will just drain processing power and with it battery power. You should quit all apps that aren’t critical to help you with your task at hand. To do this just press and hold the menu key to open the app chooser (sorta like alt+tab on windows) and select the app you want to close. Click again on the menu key and select close from the menu.
- Switch Networks. Sure 3G is faster than 2G or EDGE but it alse sucks up more power. So if you don’t need the lighting fast speed of 3G you can change your network to 2G. To do this Go to: Options>Mobile Network and on the Network Mode choose 2G.
- Turn off Wifi and Bluetooth. Again if you don’t need these you should turn it off. Using the Bluetooth dongle stuck in our ear hardly qualifies as essential. Give Wifi the same treatment. To turn them off click on the menu button then Manage Connections and uncheck Wifi and Bluetooth.
- Dim the screen. Turn it down to level 10 (out of 100) brightness and set it to autodim itself every 30 minutes. It’s super annoying but its super power saver. To do this go to: Options>Screen/Keyboard and set Backlight Brightness to 10 and Backlight Timeout to 30 seconds.
- Keep talk time to a minimum. Talking on you BlackBerry is really strains the battery, you should keep voice conversations to an absolute minimum, instead encourage your contacts to use email or blackberry messenger both are less power consuming than talking.
These are my tips for saving power on those ciritical moments. Did I forget some? Share with us your power saving tips in the comments section. We are glad to hear from you. Expect more power saving tips for the iPhone too!
