Randy Patterson and I were discussing battery usage on the Windows Phone 8 (he has an HTC 8X and I have a Nokia 822), and he was struggling with poor battery usage. I asked if he had taken the time to manage his application background tasks, to which he stated “What do you mean?”. I took a few minutes to show him how to do it and he comment was “you should blog about this, I had no clue you could do this”. So, here we are and I would like to thank Randy for the blog idea.
To get started go into your “Settings” on your Windows Phone 8, once there swipe from right to left to get to the “applications” screen, then tap background tasks. You will see a list of applications the have a background task, and my rule of thumb is, if it does not have regular or wide tile on my start screen or the live tile data I don’t really care about then I block it to save battery time. Now you may ask “how do I block an application?”, as you can see below it is fairly painless to do - one in background task simply tap the app then tap block.
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Let’s take a quick look at my battery usage to see how I have things performing. As you can see below I have almost 3 days of usage from a single charge.
Now as a side note, if your mail supports push technologies like Office 365 or Outlook you don’t need to worry about the next comment. if you use pop, you should set your POP email to check every 30 minutes to an hour, this will help increase your battery time as well.
Well I hope these suggestions help you, if you would like to know more please let me know.