I was first introduced to batteries by my father who used to
change AAA battery in our crimson rimmed wall clock, once a year. I was
fascinated by the chemical reactions and the magic of ions involved in storing
and discharging power. I even carried out some childhood experiments on them
after watching the famous Duracell
advertisements in television. Since then, Devices have made significant
leap whereas batteries which power them have increased their sprint power, but
not the galloping ability.
Today’s smart and portable device users are victims of short
life fried batteries and their daily charging rituals. And when you try to replace
them, they almost cost the new device price which is ridiculous! As a
consequence, battery life of the device has become an important criterion in
purchase decision. It also makes one to think that it could be a strategy
adopted by device manufacturers to ensure constant demand in market.
There are many websites, blogs and device manuals which recommend
following tips in general. Some of them
are proven to work but with meager results, while others are like alchemy
tricks.
o
Each charging eats away one cycle of battery. So
charge it fully and run it till it is near empty.
This is easy to say, but tough to follow. Users don’t want to be caught
off-guard or be blocked by drained battery during important occasions or at a
place where there is no outlet to recharge. They charge it as and when they
remember, just like refueling your car and keeping it ready.
o
Don’t keep it plugged in for a long time.
Generally when you are playing intensive games and that too for long
hours, you don’t want to be annoyed by ‘popup’ messages. So users keep their
devices connected. Why can’t we design smart adapters which will sense the
battery level in the device and then pass on the charge to it when needed?
o
Turn off the high power consumption applications
like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS etc.
Bluetooth and GPS make sense, whereas Wi-Fi is unreasonable. It is what
that makes the smart portable devices score over the traditional wired ones.
So, the application providers must include power consumption too as an
essential non-functional requirement for their product and must specify it
along with the hardware requirement.
o
Close unwanted browsers.
Users prefer to keep recently visited interesting web pages open for
quick near future reference. Though the modern browsers do provide detailed
logs of history and bookmark features, yet they are not so popular when
compared to this practice. So, we need more UI design changes to effectively
increase the usability of this powerful back end feature. Similar story is
found with cluttered desktop, why can’t we provide a virtual desktop overview
with quick access features?
o
Shutdown the system, when not in use.
Long time taken by OS to reboot had made users to leave their system on
and incline towards sleep feature as a power saving mechanism. This feature
requires creation of temp files and logs to recreate the last login session
during reboot; as a result it clogs the system in long run. Why can’t we design
JVM kind of component for OS to clean up the mess?
o
Frequent updates are necessary.
Users
are generally averse to changes, as they do not want to disturb the current
setup and waste time in troubleshooting it. I believe the cloud and SaaS seems
to be the answer for this problem.
I have tried almost all of the above tips and was successful
in reducing my battery charging cycle frequency from every day to once in two
days. It appears to be trivial in words, but if you see in numbers it is nearly
50%!
Feel free to share your tips gained from experience and also
funny alchemy tricks.
Source:
