So what’s your WP 8.1 battery life like?

We’ve been all over the board here at the staff since the update.  Some of us are claiming constant non-stop drain and others are doing okay.  I can’t say we’ve had anyone reporting massive increases in battery life though.  Fair disclosure does dictate that I tell you we’re quite the phone junkies so we’re constantly using, tweaking, playing, testing, messing, screwing with our phones so we’re not among the battery life friendly crowd.  Some of us have been doing what we can to squeeze the most out of them despite our heavy use.  Battery saver is supposed to help you discover what exactly it is that’s eating up your mAh.  So far it’s been telling us nothing but IE.  To me this means there are some OS processes that may be draining your juice that haven’t been ironed out due to some unknown issue, I believe may possibly be firmware optimization.  Regardless of what’s causing it let’s examine some things that might help us at least get back a few percentage ticks on your battery bar.

First, turn it off and then back on.  If you’re not trying this then you probably had someone else turn on your computer, open the web browser and get you to this article in the first place.  You probably will have no idea what I’m talking about in the rest of this or any other article.  Get smarter.  Use technology better.

Second you’re going to need to go back through all your apps in the battery saver and tell it which ones you do and do not want using battery in the background.  Updating to 8.1 resets everything to default, which is on all the time as much as possible because apps makers are self-centered like that.  So go back in and reset everything to what you would like.  The only news I’m getting now is through the Cortana wide tile.  So I removed my news and sports tiles and disabled their background updating.  They’ll still update when you open and use them however so it’s not like they become unusable.  Plus those of you not fortunate enough to have maintained an unlimited data plan will decrease the usage on that front as well.

Third are the good old brightness settings.  Make sure you’re on automatic.  My 1020 does a great job of regulating my brightness to the appropriate level.  They’ve learned a lot since the shoddy sensor control on the 900 obviously that would only update the brightness setting when it was too low and I got all the way into the settings menu to change it to high.  I hated so many little things about that phone.

Fourth, supposedly is the fact the back button was not supposed to close apps in 8.1 but only suspend them.  I have found that for the most part, the back button will close most apps.  There are a few that sneak through though.  Every time you open the Facebook app as it hooks into the OS will not close with the use of the back button.  Facebook would love to be open in your background gobbling up your precious personal information along with a good bit of your phone’s go go juice.  So start keeping an eye on your open apps and use the new handy swipe down to dismiss the insolent offenders of battery over use.

Fifth, check your accounts.  Go through your accounts and figure out what it is you are and are not using.  Don’t sync your Hotmail/Microsoft accounts, other than daily, if you aren’t using them.  I also went into my Gmail settings and told it not to sync contacts or calendar information because I don’t use those features of Gmail.  Not when I have a windows phone.

These are the things I’ve seen passed around the staff and other places.  Let us know how your battery is doing and help us out with some tips of your own to get the most out each charge.