It came to my attention the other day that most people who purchase the Huawei IDEOS-U8150 are not aware that applications constantly run in the background updating content. This leads to both high data consumption & battery usage. This therefore has led to branding of the phone as a data hog & the battery has been termed as useless! This is not the case & will prove this by giving instructions on how to optimize the phone so as to reduce data consumption & prolong battery life. This blog is targeted to “non root” users because they cannot underclock/overclock their CPU.

There are four main applications that constantly download & sync data to the phone from the internet & these are: Facebook for Android, Market, News & Weather, Twitter for Android & the phone’s Accounts & Sync Settings. I will now give simple step by step instructions on how to play around with the settings of these applications so that you can get the best out of your IDEOS in terms of data & battery usage.

1. FACEBOOK FOR ANDROID

>Open the Facebook App;
>Press the options soft key (this is the button with four horizontal lines located at the bottom of your screen);
>Press the “settings” Tab on the dialogue that will appear;
>Under General settings, set the “Refresh interval” to “Never”; and
>Now scroll to the bottom of the screen & click on “Sync Contacts” then click on “Remove Facebook data” & press ok.

Your favebook is now configured not to automatically download data in the background. You will receive your feeds only ‘on demand’ basis.

2. MARKET

>Open the Market App;
>Press the options soft key (this is the button with four horizontal lines located at the bottom of your screen);
>Now press the “settings” button on the dialogue that will appear;
>Under “Notifications” click on the “Notify me” bar & select “Do not notify me”; and
>Scroll to the bottom of the same screen & untick the option ”Receive interest-based ads”.

Your market has now been optimized.

3. NEWS & WEATHER

>Open the News & Weather App;
>Click on the options soft key (this is the button with four horizontal lines located at the bottom of your screen);
>Press the “settings” button on the dialogue that will appear at the bottom of your screen;
>Click on “Weather settings” & untick ”Use my location”. Now press the back soft key (the arrow at the bottom of your screen);
>Click on “News settings” & then untick ”Prefetch articles”. Press the back soft key; and
>Finally click on “Refresh settings” & untick ”Auto-refresh”. Press back until you exit the application.

Now the news & weather app will only fetch articles when you tell it to!

4. TWITTER FOR ANDROID

NOTE: Only follow these instructions if you use the twitter client on your phone. If you haven’t logged in with any account, it will not affect your data/battery consumption.

>Open the Twitter Client;
>Click in the options soft key (this is the button with four horizontal lines located at the bottom of your screen);
>Press the “Settings” button on the dialogue box that appears;
>Click on “Sync contacts” & then click on “remove twitter data” & then press ok;
>Untick “sync twitter data”; and
>Click on “Refresh interval”, scroll down & choose the longest time possible (4hours).

Your twitter client will now consume minimal data & save your battery.

5. ACCOUNTS & SYNC SETTINGS

Starting from the home screen of your phone;

>Press the options soft key (this is the button with four horizontal lines located at the bottom of your screen);
>Click on the “settings” button on the dialogue that appears;
>Scroll to & click on “Accounts & Sync”; and
>Untick “Auto-sync” but leave “background data” ticked.

Your Android phone should now be optimised to use minimal data & save on its battery. I think this is the best way of using the phone without having to completely turn off the data connection thus making sure you get the most out of your phone especially the push GMail. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends who might be having problems with their data & battery.

You can follow me on twitter @Kogitronomy

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Android

August 7, 2011

5 Comments