The other day I saw an old local metal band play down the street from my house. The band split a few years ago, so it was nice to see them get back together for a reunion show. About 600 heads showed up, keep in mind its a small venue so it was hot, muggy, and packed. I decided I wanted to take pictures of the band and try to capture some video, just to see how the Nokia N82 does in conditions like a hardcore and metal concert. I'll be writing another article soon about my results with some photo samples and maybe a video. In this article however, I will talk about my experience with an extremely low N82 battery, and give tips to get the most you possibly can out of it. Pretty much squeeze as much juice and as many photos and videos imaginable out of your Nokia N82.
When I arrived at the show, dummy me didn't have a fully charged battery. It was down to three bars. After calling and texting a few people to see where everyone was at, I was down to two bars. I started realizing I should save some battery life now, and fast - so that I can get all the media captured I wanted. First thing I did was drop the brightness down to the lowest setting and changed my backlight timeout to 5 seconds. I'm pretty sure that helped significantly. I started thinking of other things I can do. Double checked that I didn't have any unnecessary applications running in the background, turned off my auto retrieval of my email accounts and turned off WLAN search, and just stopped playing with the phone in general.
Once the band finally came on to the stage and startd playing it was time to start snappy away with my N82. I got some great shots with this trusty little camera - I mean phone - I'll show you more later. About 12 shots in I realized I was down to 1 bar and got a battery low alert. Crap! What else can I do to save battery life. Keep in mind I was taking shot after shot, back to back in low light conditions. Not just here and there, contstant. First thing I realized is I didn't need a signal or reception. I wasn't planning on making or taking any calls. So I went to my profiles and set it to Offline Mode. This is pretty much like pulling out your sim card. All other functions work on the phone, just no signal. I made sure to close down Location Tagger as well. If you haven't heard, Nokia has a beta release of Location Tagger that allows you to tag photos with GPS coordinates. This is just until the N82's next firmware update, in which Geo Tagging is supposed to be built in. Anyways, I did one more thing to make the battery life stretch. Went into my camera settings and switched the "show captured image" to off. Doesn't seem like much, but the time it takes for the image to process and then the preview to show is drastic when it comes to hanging onto that last bar. Instead it processes the image you shot and then goes back to the viewfinder, ready for the next capture.
So basically thats all I can think of to save battery life, and sure enough the phone didn't die. I got lots of shots and some great video (although the audio sucks). And no battery low warnings besides that first one. Amazing! After I got that first warning, I took about ten minutes of video and around 30 photos, and again - no more battery warnings. Phone never died on me, and the band's performance lasted about an hour.
Here's a simple rundown of what I did. Maybe some of these battery life tips will help you when you run into this situation on our N82, or any S60 phone for that matter.
- turn off email retrievals
- close any unnecessary applications running in the background
- set your screen brightness all the way down, as well has your light time-out
- don't use any gps
- turn off wlan searching
- don't text or call unless its absolutely necessary
- turn of the "show captured image", or image preview in your camera settings
- in drastic times, set your phone to offline mode under the profiles.
Thats about everything I can think of. Let me know if you guys have any other ideas, the more the better.
Stay tuned today or tomorrow for the concert images and maybe some video from the night.
7 comments:
i love this article! Nice job mike. Great new tips getting the most out of your battery life, especially when you need it most. I always visit blogs like yours everyday, and then82blog is the last on the list. Cause i always save the best for last! Haha. Kip up d good work man. More power! Cheers!
quick question... wouldn't the change of all these settings finish your low battery level?
@ gust,
glad you like the article. all these tips really saved my ass.
toutratus,
half of the changes were done before i got my first battery warning. after the battery warning i just changed to offline mode, changed the photo preview and closed location tagger. i guess if you catch it early enough it'll be fine.
just like on my laptop when my battery is really low, i drop down the brightness and don't use anymore sound and i drag out an extra 20 mins i wouldn't have had.
You can also switch off the rotate sensor, that's about 0.05watts (checked with Nokia Energy Profiler)... every little drop counts in such situation :p
anyway, I was wondering... is there any app to set power/settings profiles (so I can change between High and Low instead of having to set each item: light, sensor, wlan, etc...)?
hey loxai thats a great tip i didn't even think of that one. i've always wished nokia would allow us to set up profiles for power settings, kind of like on a computer. maybe a 3rd party developer will come up with something like that someday.
thanks for the kind words gust keep the comments coming.
I've recently gotten an N82 and must say I'm absolutely loving it. The one big drawback, however, is battery life. It seems to struggle to make it to the end of the day if I've used GPS navigation and the camera even if just for short spurts.
I was wondering if it makes sense to buy a second battery, like I had for my old camera, for those times when you run out of juice far away from a power outlet.
Is this something you've done/would recommend/would advise against?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Hi Olaf, glad your enjoying the phone. A second battery might be good, but I highly recommend getting a Proporta Mobile Charger for Nokia.
Just google those terms and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's pretty awesome and works a lot better than having a second battery. I'm going to make a post about it in the near future.
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