The Sony Xperia Z5
is one of the longer lasting smartphones you can buy, but there’s
always room for improvement. If you’re often finding that the battery in
your Xperia doesn’t last as long as you would like it to, there are
several ways to get it to go further. Here are our favorite Sony Xperia
Z5 battery tips.
1. Discover what’s draining the battery
The first thing to
look at is the battery status page, which tells you which services and
apps are having the biggest impact on your battery life.
Go into Settings > Power Management
and you’ll see a screen showing how much battery life the Xperia thinks
you have left, and you’ll also see the various power saving modes that
are available to you.
2. Use stamina mode
Turning on
stamina mode improves battery life by turning off mobile data and Wi-Fi
whenever the screen is off, and by slightly reducing performance too.
Doing
so makes a noticeable difference to battery life, but it does so by
stopping notifications such as new emails. If that’s a problem, you can
specify exemptions from stamina mode by selecting the appropriate app in
Apps Active in Standby.
3. Not enough? Try ultra stamina mode
What do you do if stamina mode isn’t enough? You could try ultra stamina mode, which takes stamina mode a few steps further.The effect on your phone’s functionality is really dramatic – ultra stamina mode disables almost everything apart from phone calls and SMS text messages – but if you need a big push to get your battery to last a little longer, then ultra stamina mode might just do the trick.
4. Change location settings
GPS is useful, but it can also be a bit of a battery hog. If you go into Settings > Location > Mode you’ll see three options. High Accuracy, as you might expect, the most accurate, but it’s also the most power hungry. If you don’t need your GPS to be super accurate all time, then try Battery Saving, which reduces its demands significantly.Device Only is the least draining, but also the least precise. You can also turn off location services altogether, although of course that means doing so for every single app on your phone.
5. Enable low battery mode
Your Sony’s power management
options include low battery mode, which kicks in automatically when
battery power drops below the percentage you specify. It turns off
Bluetooth, GPS and vibration and turns down the screen too, and you can
adjust what it does and doesn’t disable by ticking or unticking the
checkboxes.
We’d recommend switching off vibrate on touch, image
enhancement and auto sync during low battery mode, as none of these
features are in any way essential. You can specify what battery
percentage triggers low battery mode by tapping Activation.
6. Queue background data
Here’s another feature that can make
a noticeable difference to your battery life: queue background data. In
normal operation, apps can and do update themselves and download data
in the background, and that’s good because it means when you switch back
to the app it’s up to date.
But that can be horrendous for
battery life, so enabling queue background data limits such updates to
set intervals. It won’t stop new message notifications or anything
important, but it will stop unnecessary updating ruining your battery
life.
7. Investigate sudden changes to battery life
If
you’ve been getting OK battery life and all of a sudden it goes bad,
unless you’ve suddenly changed what you’re doing (perhaps you’ve
installed an exciting new game that you’re hopelessly addicted to, so
you’re on your phone much more than usual), the chances are you’ve got a
rogue app draining the battery.
Have a look in Power Management to
see if there’s an obvious culprit, and if not it’s not a bad idea to
uninstall the most recently installed app or apps to see if that changes
battery life. Some apps are just really bad for power use; for example,
Facebook is known to reduce Android battery life by up to 20 percent in some cases.
Do you have any battery tips we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
