The Nexus 6 has a huge 3,220mAh battery and combined with Android 5.0 Lollipop’s battery optimisation thanks to Google’s Project Volta, provides pretty decent battery life, but there’s always room for improvement, especially when compared to the battery life of the Xperia Z3 or OnePlus One for example.
That’s why we’ve compiled a few tips you can use on your Nexus 6, and pretty much most Android smartphones, to stretch the battery life just a little bit further. These may be common knowledge to the technically gifted of us who know our devices inside-out, but will perhaps prove useful for someone who is not necessarily familiar with such techniques.
Turn off Ambient Display
To benefit from a longer standby time, head on into Settings -> Display -> Ambient Display to turn it off. Ambient display allows you to see notifications without having to fully wake the device, but at the cost of battery life.
Optimise Location Settings
Google allows for different location modes when it comes to the accuracy and method of obtaining your location for various apps. Often certain apps, especially social network apps, can request a GPS location quite frequently putting a strain on your battery.
If you’re not running the Maps application and can cope with a less refined location, then it’s worth setting your location to only be requested by using your geo-location through WiFi or Cellular network. Alternatively, to fully save battery, you can turn location services off completely.
Enable automatic brightness
It should come of no surprise that usually the biggest culprit of battery drain is the screen itself, and with the huge 6-inch qHD display on the Nexus 6, having the wrong brightness settings can significantly affect battery life.
Android 5.0 Lollipop has a feature called adaptive brightness, which automatically adjusts the brightness of your screen to suit the environment. This means that firstly you don’t have to manually adjust the brightness and also ensures permanent maximum brightness isn’t killing your battery. You can check adaptive brightness is still enabled in Settings -> Brightness.
Check what is using your battery
Even having every battery optimisation under the sun turned on, all it takes is one erroneous app to be maxing out your processor to absolutely kill your battery life, so be sure to check what is using the most battery under Settings -> Battery.
You should notice the usual culprits like ‘screen’ and ‘Android OS’, but if you see an app that you haven’t used in a while clocking up the %’s then chances are it’s doing something funky in the background and needs to be force closed or uninstalled.
Do you have any other tricks that you’ve found gives you the few extra hours of battery life on the Nexus 6, or any other Android device? Let us know in the comments below.
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