Many people thought that Nokia made a big mess when they released Lumia 710 and 800 in hurry. Nokia received myriad of complaints from enraging people who suffered with poor battery life performance of Lumia series handset. This has also sparked a huge debate on usefulness of Windows Phone compared to Android monsters which comes with double capacity. With no LTE support, lower or outdated hardware and background manager, Windows Phone was expected to have better battery life compared to Android devices which had all the above factors to hamper their battery performance.

Later, Nokia did push an update to fix battery issue of lumia series handsets. However, it arose few pretty simple and basic questions in user’s mind, Is it that difficult to increase battery life performance on our Windows Phone? Are there any steps that could lead us to improved battery performance? Answer to latter question is emphatic, yes. Few extra precautionary steps taken on our side can often yield in significant improvement in battery performance.

Instead of waiting for device manufacturer or OS maker to provide a fix, users would have to implement some extra steps to get optimum performance from their smartphone.

Steps to Increase Battery Life on Windows Phone

1. Dark Background Theme: Instead of using white background color, users can use dark background color theme which often leads to improved battery life on Windows Phone. As a de facto standard white color or light theme consumes more power compared to dark background.

Go to Settings->theme. From here change Background from light to dark and instead of using light accent use brown accent.

2. Brightness: Unfortunately, Windows Phone doesn’t have full-fledged brightness controller. There are only three options available: low, medium and high. It would have been better if we had more control over brightness like iOS device does.

Go to Settings->brightness and set it to medium or low (latter is not a viable option in many cases). Alternatively, you can automatically adjust the brightness too.

3. WiFi, Bluetooth: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the culprit of hogging battery life. In case, if you’re not using it, it is always advisable to turn them off.

Navigate to Settings->Wi-Fi and Settings-> Bluetooth respectively to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

4. Phone Update:  Phone update will often check for new updates for your phone. Instead you can subscribe to our blog to know whether any update is available for your phone or not (shameless promotion). It also saves your data connection charges.

Go to Settings-> phone update and uncheck ‘Notify me when new updates are found’.

5. Battery saver: Windows Phone comes with a battery saver option. Basically, it turns off automatic check of emails, apps update and other services in background which results in great saving of battery life. There is also an option to turn it on when your battery is critically low.

Go to Settings->battery saver and check both options (Always turn on Battery Saver when battery is low and Turn on Battery Saver now, until next charge).

Last option comes in very handy especially when you are traveling.

6. Attentive Phone: Attentive phone is a very nice app provided by HTC. It automatically quite ring when you move phone or you turn over your phone to silence during incoming call. Probably, it won’t help you much but it is still a good application to have if you are a HTC Windows Phone user.

7. Background Task: Background task lists all the apps that can run in background even they’re not open. From here, you can turn off/ on background apps manually. It is always preferred to turn them off when you’re traveling or away from charger.

Go to Settings-> applications->background task. Manually turn off unnecessary tasks from here.

8. Location service: Turn off location service whenever you’re at home, office or known place. Probably, you do not need location service at theses places. Whenever possible try to avoid downloading games and apps which are unnecessarily using location service. Users can manually turn off location service too.

Go to Setting-> location and turn off the service.

Location service of Maps, people need to turn it off manually from applications setting. Location service is yet another major factor to affect your Windows Phone battery performance. Turn it off whenever you do not need it.

Some other precautions like locking the phone whenever not in use (or while playing music) will help a lot. Enable dark wallpaper, screen time out to 1 minutes and turn off Xbox live auto connect options from setting to save battery life of Windows Phone.

Following above steps would surely increase battery life of your Windows Phone.

Tags: how to, nokia wp