Watts
FREE
The biggest issue with just about every smartphone is its battery life (or lack thereof). Android devices are no different, and the scope of their problems even tends to be greater because of the platform's ability to run multiple programs that send and receive network data, simultaneously, in the background. Yet all you probably use to manage your power consumption is a little battery icon that gradually gets emptier of colour.
Watts is a free app that gives you a clearer perspective on the power level of your phone over time, tracking the percentage of full charge and graphing it over a user-selectable period of one to five days. Wondering if a particular app is draining the battery? Curious about how much battery life you'll save by tweaking a setting (such as backlight brightness) or turning off a feature (such as Wi-Fi)?
POWER CURVE
Turn on Watts, start the app in question or make your changes to the phone's options, and the software will keep an eye on battery level. The steeper the cliff on the chart, the more power the phone is consuming. Simple and effective.
There are a few things we wish Watts did better. First, the utility would be much more useful as a guide to power usage if it kept track of the time and date when we started another app. It could also show an indicator at each point in time where we changed the screen brightness, turned one of the wireless devices on or off, made a call or launched a specified power-hogging app (internet radio programs being a common example). And it would be nice if the timeline's grid lines were aligned to the hour on the hour, instead of what appears to be a random time of day in the middle of a given hour.
Then again, Watts is completely free of charge (if you'll pardon the pun), and its author admits that he isn't a professional developer but has produced the app as a training tool and work in progress. It's very useful despite the omissions, and we hope to see many improvements in the future.
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