How to extend your smartphone’s battery life

Yes, we love our smartphones. Whether it’s instant messaging, checking e-mail, playing Angry Birds, or even making the occasional phone call, our smartphones have become constant companions. In fact, our mobile phones have become our lifelines to family, friends and the outside world. But while they may be our favorite gadgets, they can also be the source of intense frustration. Listen, I am not talking dropped calls and poor reception, I am talking about battery life – or what perhaps should more accurately be described as battery death. It doesn’t seem to matter how much battery life we have when we leave home in the morning, by lunchtime that happy green bar has turned a nasty red, and we are desperately trying to squeeze in one last e-mail before we are cut off in mid-sentence. 

While we have a half-day’s work left ahead of us, our smartphone has decided it has had enough, leaving us scrambling for a charger and a nearby power outlet. But while more complex features and apps undoubtedly put a strain on the too-small batteries that are found in most smartphones, there are certain things that we can do to make the overnight charge last a little longer. Here are some measures that could be taken to address the poor battery life of your smartphone.

Turn the phone off

This will probably be the most effective and simple way of conserving your battery’s power. Why? This will help conserve energy and also charge your phone. If you don't plan on answering the phone while you're sleeping or after business hours, just turn it off. Do the same if you are in an area with no reception (such as a subway or remote area, since constantly searching for service depletes the battery fairly quickly.) Some phones have an automatic power save feature, but it takes about 30 minutes with no service to kick in. By then, much battery power has been used. If you don't need to receive or make calls but are using a smartphone as a PDA, disable the phone functionality (flight mode).

 Stop searching for a signal

 When you are in an area with poor or no signal, your phone will constantly look for a better connection, and will use up all your power doing so. This is easily understood if you have ever forgotten to turn off your phone on a flight. The best way to ensure longer battery life is to make sure you have a great signal where you use your phone. If you don't have a perfect signal, get a cell phone repeater which will amplify the signal to provide near perfect reception anywhere.

Switch the vibrate function off on your phone, using just the ring tone

The vibrate function uses additional battery power. Keep the ring tone volume as low as possible.

Turn off your phone's back light

The back light is what makes the phone easier to read in bright light or outside. However, the light also uses battery power. If you can get by without it, your battery will last longer. If you have to use the back light, many phones will let you set the amount of time to leave the back light on. Shorten that amount of time. Usually, one or two seconds will be sufficient. Some phones have an ambient light sensor, which can turn off the back light in bright conditions and enable it in darker ones.

Avoid using unnecessary features

 If you know it will be a while before your phone’s next charge, don’t use the camera or connect to the Internet. Flash photography can drain your battery especially quickly.

Keep calls short

This is obvious, but how many times have you heard someone on their mobile phone say, "I think my battery’s dying," and then continue their conversation for several minutes? Sometimes, the dying battery is just an excuse to get off the phone (and a good one, at that), but if you really need to conserve the battery, limit your talk time.

Turn off Bluetooth

It will drain your battery very quickly. 

Same goes for WIFI, GPS, and infrared capabilities, if your phone has these features built in

Keep them off except when you need them to save power.

Turn the brightness of the display to the lowest setting possible.

Use GSM rather than 3G

 

Using your phone in 3G / Dual Mode will drain the battery quicker than if you just use GSM mode - have a look at your phones spec and you'll see it will quote two different battery life times - normally 50 percent more for pure GSM use.

With a smartphone, avoid using moving or animated pictures or videos for your background.

Animated backgrounds will drain the battery faster. Use a black background whenever possible. 

AMOLED screens use a lot less power displaying black instead of white. When web browsing ,use websites like Blackl that display a black Google background instead of white.

Social media may replace corporate website

Ben Uzor Jr

Slowly but definitely, social media are growing in popularity, trying to replace the corporate websites of small, medium and multinational businesses in Nigeria. Businesses are increasingly developing innovative social media strategy to connect with and ultimately sell to customers. Before hand, end users, suppliers, distributors and general merchant organisation oftentimes, resort to web portals of their brands for fresh contents and exclusive deals, however, nothing begging for attentions could be found on many websites at present. But more importantly, the social media landscape – and the technology – is constantly evolving, which, according to industry watchers should make it easier for businesses to wrap their marketing plans around.

And just like the initial trend and subsequent evolution of websites, industry watchers say businesses across the globe are figuring out how to use social media as a customer acquisition tool. According to them, while websites are not going away anytime soon, they may be the big loser to social media. Jim Blasingame, a small business advocate believes websites have some critical factors working against them. “Most are not easy for the typical owner to update, which is increasingly important to customers. They don’t come with their own community, nor help you build one. “One of the most troubling statistics in the 16 years since the first commercial website is that half of Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) still don’t have one.

“My prediction is that within three years, over half of small businesses will have a social media presence, because this strategy comes with both of the elements lacking in a website: easy to create and update, and community-building tools. Folake Ani-Mumuney, head, marketing and corporate communications at First Bank Nigeria Plc warned that in not too distant future corporate websites will be replaced by their social media, fueled by more and more consumers engaging in daily conversations, often involving brands, across multiple applications, platforms and networks, wholly independent of these sites. Ani-Mumuney made the remark at Brand Communication seminar held in Lagos recently, stressing that most companies are giving up on the idea of a brochure-ware website which serves as the information hub centre for a brands attractiveness to customers and sustainability.

She said, although a brand is groomed to align with contemporary dispositions in the society, as consumers’ conversations become increasingly independent of corporate sites, falling traffic will render them ineffective in their current form. In a lecture entitled, “Sustaining the Brand”, Ani-Mumuney maintained that companies, “…may not necessarily morph information on your brand to social media, rather you should make sure that necessary information your customer will require is there anytime, because people would like to access ort source for any information concerning your company or brand even with their mobile phones. “So the very scope for a brand in this shifting marketplace will be its core values and purpose.

“The strict definition, execution and adherence to values allows for a brand to move without cannibalizing itself. “Corporate website is supposed to serve the purpose as launch pads for outreach rather than destinations for inbound interest. Their main role will be to constantly engage consumers in conversation and actively control any misleading information about the brand. Researches have shown that in the last seven years, the core of a business’ online marketing program consisted of: a website, the customer database and an email marketing program, perhaps, as de-facto plan for many businesses as they appear, the platforms are not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, but quickly becoming antiquated models of thinking.

Result of a Social Media Benchmark survey conducted by business.com shows that 2948 businesses were involved in decentralization of marketing plan. Over 40 percent indicated they maintained a social site presence. Further more, among then are 1,197 respondents that indicated their company maintained a profile on one or more social media sites, 8o per cent maintain a Facebook presence and 56 per cent have a company account on Twitter. The average company has a presence on three different social media sites, announcing a big change in mentality and certainly a windfall to the online marketer.

The head, marketing and corporate communications at First Bank Nigeria Plc added that the focus of brand awareness at any given moment, especially to the brand at large, a product launch, or some larger conversation to which it is relevant should be a moving target driven by conversation flow, engagement levels, technology tools and context. Before the advent of ad-nauseam social media platforms, corporate communications, applications, and on-line marketing and branding were perfected by organizations via websites, with many businesses in the mid- to late 90′s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.

Investment in underwater cables hit N365bn amid poor internet service

Ben Uzor Jr

With an estimated investment of about N365 billion ($2.24bn) in underwater cables in the country over the past five years, Nigerians are yet to feel the impact of this investment and are starved of access to reliable and affordable broadband services. Analyst told Benuzorreports that apart from the absence of distribution networks needed to move the available bandwidth capacity across Nigeria, big telecommunications firms are engaging in anti-competition practices, locking up their fibre infrastructure from smaller players. But more importantly, Nigeria’s low mobile Average Revenue per User (ARPU) is discouraging investment in last mile networks required to take internet capacity to the end user, industry analysts have said.

According to the industry analysts, infrastructure providers are increasingly shying away from making requisite investment in distribution and last mile networks because recouping the investments for infrastructure deployment is an uphill task in a country where ARPU for mobile and fixed networks are at the lowest ebb of the spectrum by international standards. Nigeria’s ARPUs have continued to decline on a-year-on-year basis, and according to analysts investors do not perceive the last mile segment of the broadband internet ecosystem as feasible from a return on investment perspective. A new report from the Business Monitor International (BMI) shows that Nigeria’s mobile ARPU rate fell by 21.2 percent in 2011 to reach N1, 011.

This, analyst at BMI say was considerably more than a 4.3 percent in 2010 to reach N1, 283, adding that Nigeria’s blended ARPU will decline by 6.9 percent in 2012 to N949. To address this challenge, Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in an interview, weekend said the commission plans to give financial incentives to infrastructure providers. “This is to enable service delivery at affordable prices for the end-user, where it may not be economically viable to do so; the NCC intends to offer financial incentives to the infrastructure providers to enable them operate reasonably profitably.” It was gathered that over 9.54 terabyte of internet capacity from four cables is lying untapped on Nigeria’s shores.

The challenge, according to industry watchers is the unavailability of distribution network to move this available bandwidth capacity across the length and breadth of the country. This is hindering the country from benefiting from the huge investment in underwater cables. It is estimated that the landing of the 7, 000 kilometre MainOne Cable in June 2010 gulped $240 million. Glo-1 cable which stretches 10, 000 km from the United Kingdom (UK) to the west coast of Africa, costs about $800 million. NITEL’s South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) is valued at $600 million. About $600 million was spent in building the West African Cable System (WACS), a project driven by a consortium of 14 firms, MTN Group inclusive. The total investments and other miscellaneous expenses rose to $2.24 billion within five years. Industry analysts further argue that the arrival of these underwater cables was expected to push up internet speed and reduce cost but little has been achieved in terms of accessibility, availability and affordability.

Presently, internet connectivity is basically concentrated in the major commercial hubs: Lagos, Abuja and to some extent Port Harcourt. The large chunk of the blame has been stacked on the big players in the industry who restrict smaller players from sharing infrastructure, by this means denying Nigeria the much expected benefits of broadband. World Bank studies show, quite conclusively, that in Low Countries, every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration accelerates economic growth by 1.38 percentage points. Funke Opeke, chief executive officer of MainOne Cable told Benuzorreports that intervention in access to critical last mile infrastructure for the delivery of services to end users remains essential for progress. 

“Regulating access to, and prices of, existing backbone and last mile distribution infrastructure will create competition and provide further incentives to new entrants to deploy only unavailable infrastructure. The objective should not be to stifle growth in infrastructure development but to ensure that efficient competition is fostered and infrastructure builds are appropriately directed to meet areas where those needs truly exist, whilst services requirement in areas with existing backbone infrastructure could be immediately addressed. The nature of competition contemplated is the fair and competitive unbundling of local loop access to existing infrastructure by an infrastructure owning operator to other service providers”

This, she further added should be done at prices that are reasonable and reflective of economic cost of the provision and maintenance of the infrastructure and sundry investment by the facility owners. Pieter du Preez, group executive at Spescom, argues that the first principle of promoting competition is the availability of options. “But availability is nothing without demand.” He further pointed out that the demand for broadband capacity in Africa is still in its infancy, inspite of the country being seen by the global business community as a telecoms gold mine to be harvested by international conglomerates. “And with a large amount of capacity available on the shores, Nigeria has to ask what is keeping demand at bay.

“The answer is found in underdeveloped regional Internet usage, relatively low demand for bandwidth intensive applications such as video and cloud services, cost and accessibility. “A large component of the solution to these challenges – and one that could add a new dimension to offerings – is participation by service providers in carrier neutral co-location. No single player will drive the demand for broadband capacity, but an open market place for connecting to multiple carriers and services will aid in the ultimate distribution of bandwidth availability”, he further concluded. Government is conscious of the potentials of broadband for economic prosperity, and is already targeting a fresh stream of revenue from broadband services.

Telcos poor utilisation of 3G spectrum slows broadband growth

Ben Uzor Jr

After four years of commercial rollout of 3G (Third Generation) services in Nigeria’s telecommunications market, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have failed to efficiently utilise the 3G spectrum resource to drive ubiquitous broadband availability across the entire country. Estimates reveal that Nigeria had little above 6 million 3G subscribers as at the end of 2011. This figure, according to industry analysts, weekend is equivalent to about 6.4 percent of the total mobile subscriber base and also indicative of operators’ defective strategies in terms of proficiently driving up utilisation of the 3G spectrum thereby enabling more Nigerians especially those in the rural communities have access to reasonably priced broadband internet services .

The total number of active telephone subscriptions in Nigeria has reached 99.14 million as at March 2012, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).  A report by Business Monitor International (BMI) assessed by Business Day at the weekend revealed that Nigeria had about 3.2 million mobile customers with 3G-enabled handsets by the end of 2010.Interestingly, this sound like a fairly large amount but, according to analyst at BMI, it was equivalent to just 3.7 percent of the total mobile users. According to the report entitled: ‘Nigeria Telecommunications Report Q2 2012’, the number of 3G subscribers grew by 113 percent from approximately 1.5 million at the end of 2009 and 950, 000 at the end of 2008.

The commission awarded 3G licenses to MTN Nigeria, Airtel, Globacom and Alheri Mobile Services in March 2007. By December 2010, Etisalat Nigeria acquired a license to provide 3G services by buying start-up Alheri, a wholly owned subsidiary of conglomerate Dangote Group. Globacom launched commercial 3G services during December 2007 in Lagos, Abuja and PortHarcourt. In recent times, the federal government and the NCC have received heavy knocks from operators and stakeholders in the telecoms industry over poor spectrum management. Besides, telecoms operators say the unavailability of requisite frequency spectrum is slowing down broadband internet network expansion plans, especially in the rural communities.

Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman, NCC said in an interview, “If you check frequencies in 2.1 GHz (3G), Nigeria has offered more frequencies than any other country in the world with very little impact in terms of broadband penetration.” Nigeria has one of the lowest broadband penetration rates in the world at a meagre 3 percent. Juwah said, “Operators have not done much with these scarce frequency resources. I have said it before if the commission has more spectrum, we will give it out. The only spectrum NCC has is in the 2.3GHz band and we are going to auction it this year. We have decided at the National Frequency Management Council (NFMC) that the 2.6GHz which is the spectrum telecoms providers need will be planned properly with the broadcast industry, re-farmed and we decide how to allocate them to telcos.

“However, these frequencies will become free in 2015. Re-echoing the view of Juwah as it relates to efficient use of 3G spectrum, Kazeem Oladipo, general counsel for MainOne Cable Company told Business Day in an interview that telecoms operators have not done much. “Anytime, I hear a clamour for more frequency spectrum allocation, the next thing that comes to mind is what telecoms operators have done with the bands allocated to them. Look at the 3G spectrum, operators in Nigeria have not done much with it from a broadband penetration standpoint. They have not made the most efficient use of these spectrum frequencies to even justify further allocation. In all honesty, they are not utilising the 3G spectrum efficiently”.

Though, the NCC publishes detailed data on the mobile market, it does not comment on 3G customer numbers. In its YE11 results, MTN reported 1.7 million data active smartphones and 330, 000 dongles on its network. This, according to analysts at BMI implies that MTN accounted for around a third of Nigeria’s 3G subscriber base in 2011. According to the industry analysts, increasing availability of low-cost smartphones and lower data tariffs because of cost effective international bandwidth from the growing number of submarine cables systems on the shores are major factors driving uptake of 3G services in Nigeria. BMI expects that the number of 3G customers to rise to about 9.2 million by the end of 2012, and 24.386 million by the end of 2016. At this point, the 3G market will account for nearly 19 percent of all mobile subscriptions.