Apple, BlackBerry, Samsung and other global brands have come up with smartphones equipped with powerful mobile operating systems such as Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian, Apple’s iOS, etc, that allows users to play games, listen to mp3s, snap pictures, have access to the Net and even stream videos.

Given their diverse range of capabilities and multi-functionality running on a mobile (as in on-the-go) platform, it’s no wonder that battery life has always been a concern for developers, manufacturers and the users themselves. On average, most smartphone batteries last between one and two days before being completely depleted, and in need of a recharge.

(Image Source: Dokisoft)

While we wait for the hardware development to catch up, the alternative will be to conserve battery life. As it is with our energy levels, battery life can be effectively utilized and managed, leaving nothing to go to waste. Without a battery charger or a spare battery with you everywhere you go, you’ll have to make due with minimizing the consumption of battery juice.

Here are 10 essential tips how you can conserve your smartphone’s battery.

Read Also: Top 10 Security Tools For Your Smartphone

1. Turn Off Vibrations

Vibrations are great for notifying you about incoming calls or messages when you’re in the theatre, meetings or other places where it’s necessary to keep the phone silent. In places where it doesn’t matter, it will be better for you to use your ringtone as notification if you want to keep your smartphones on longer.

Vibrations actually use up more power than ringtones. The sounds produced by ringtones are just very tiny vibrations in your smartphone’s speaker. Compare that to the shaking of the entire phone via vibrating a smart weight, playing a ringtone definitely zaps less of your battery. The same applies for using vibration for tactile feedback. If you don’t think it’s necessary, then disable vibrations or at the very least, lessen the magnitude of the vibrations.

2. Dim Your Screen

This one tip affects battery life drastically. It’s obvious that dimming your screen will reduce your smartphone’s power consumption since we all have to activate the screen whenever we use our phones. If our screen is brightly lit up every couple of minutes when we check our emails and such, it eventually will zap battery juice. Auto-brightness setting enable the smartphone to adjust the brightness to its optimal level for reading while conserving battery life.

On the other hand though, you may consider tuning the level permanently to the dimmest level that you can still read under without straining your eyes. Doing so may do wonders to your battery life in the long run.

3. Shorten Screen Timeout

In the same manner, if you wish to minimize the power consumption of your smartphone of the screen display, you ought to consider shortening the screen timeout. This decides how long the screen will remain lit after you finish interacting with it.

Some of us do not have the habit of ‘locking’ the phone after we we are done with it; we just let it go lights out by itself. Keeping the timeout duration short will ensure that the phone doesn’t waste power when you’re not using it.

4. Switching Off When Inactive

Although it is true that turning on your phone consumes more power than unlocking your phone, switching it off for a couple of hours can save more battery than leaving it on sleep or inactive mode. If you know you’re not going to touch your phone for an extended period of time, such as when you’re attending a meeting or sleeping, you can actually cut down a significant amount of energy consumption if you simply switch it off.

You might be wondering why you should even bother about battery level when you’ve a charger with you at home while you sleep. Well, the thing is that repeated charging for certain kind of batteries eats up the battery volume. For such batteries, the best way is to conserve as much as you can so that your battery retains its original capacity as much as possible.

5. Charge Your Battery Correctly

Speaking of phone charging, there are generally two kinds of rechargeable batteries commonly used for smartphones: Lithium-ion (Li-Ion), and Nickel-based batteries: namely Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) and Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd).

The battery capacity in NiCd batteries are reduced every time you recharge them. Nonetheless, NiCd batteries have longer life cycles i.e. they can be recharged more often than NiMH batteries before stop working. Nickel-based batteries should be charged (to the full amount) when they’re more or less out of power, and not when there’s still a good amount of energy left.

(Image Source: Slairea)

Li-Ion batteries have the longest life cycle among the three types of batteries but they also need to be charged more frequently (even when the battery is not fully used up) to maintain its original capacity. To keep your battery lasting longer, find out more about the type of battery that your smartphone uses and maintain the appropriate charging strategy for optimum usage.

6. Close Unnecessary Apps

Some of us open app after app and don’t bother to close them even after we no longer need to use them. This multi-tasking capability is a common feature of smartphones, but it is also a main reason why battery life gets drained away easily. The worst thing is that you’re losing battery juice when you are not even using them. Leaving them open will leave your battery at half-bar in no time.

As often as possible, kill your apps if you are not using them. There are some valuable apps out there that manage the multitasking ability of your smartphone to ensure it performs at its best to conserve battery life without jeopardizing usage. One such Android app is the Advanced Task Killer.

7. Disable GPS

Certain apps eat up more battery juice than others, particularly apps which utilize the GPS system to track your location. Your smartphone has a GPS unit that allows the sending and receiving of signals to and from satellites to determine your exact location, which is integral for some apps to work, for example, map-based apps like Google Maps or to check-in on Facebook.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

When left running in the background, some of these apps may continue to send and receive signals. It takes a lot out of your battery to continuously do that, even if you aren’t aware of it. Hence, you should ensure that those particular apps are closed when you really don’t need them. A more extreme way is to disable location services when prompted by these apps. It may slow down the efficiency of these apps but you won’t be tracked on your location and some users deliberately do that for privacy reasons.

8. No Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G/4G When Not in Use

Energy is consumed whenever your smartphone searches for signals, Wi-Fi, 3G or Bluetooth etc. When the reception is poor, the phone will continue scanning to attain a good connection. Repeated searches for these signals can easily make your battery level drop a notch.

What I’m saying is that you should turn off your Wi-Fi or Bluetooth when you don’t need to be connected. One convenient way to do it is to switch to ‘Airplane Mode’ or just switch your phone off when you know you can’t get any signal.

On the other hand, when you need good reception for your smartphone, place or position your phone in high connectivity zones. This will prevent your smartphones from constantly seeking for a connection and wasting your precious battery power switching from one signal to the other.

9. Minimize Notifications

With constant connectivity to the Internet, we tend to get notifications on our smartphones all the time, be it updates on the latest news, emails, high scores from games, add-ons for apps etc. But I’m sure that you would only want to be notified on the more essential stuffs like new text messages, or messages from Whatsapp.

(Image Source: Taakoses)

Not only is it annoying to constantly receive irrelevant notifications that can actually wait, it is also a powersucker for each of these notifications. Every incoming notification will light up your screen, make a sound alert or vibrate.

Manage your settings well and disable unnecessary notifications to save a little battery power (and avoid being frustrated with these constant notifications).

10. Maintain Cool Temperature

Some of us might have observed that our battery runs out faster when our smartphones are warm. Put simply, don’t leave your smartphones under direct sunlight or in any place that is hot.

One of the more common occurrences would be leaving the smartphone in a car parked under the sun. The battery will function optimally in cooler environments, so do look out for, and try to avoid, scenarios where your phone is exposed to unnecessary and excessive heat.

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The HTML5 revolution is exciting web designers from all areas of the globe. The new specifications support dozens of elements and attributes for building semantic websites. These new features include multimedia tags for audio and video formats.

In past years a Flash-based media player in more than sufficient for streaming on the Web and this technology is still necessary to support legacy browsers. But thankfully modern standards have advanced and the inclusion of HTML5 video opens doors for dozens of new opportunities.

In this guide I’d like to offer an introduction to HTML5 video for the Web. It will take some practice to understand the native in-browser player and all its functionality. And the best way to get familiar is diving in head first!

Recommended Reading: HTML5 Website Showcase: 48 Potential Flash-Killing Demos

1. Types of Media

When you’re working with a flash video player it’s all too common to associate all video formats in .flv. While this does work, most flv files cannot retain quality anywhere near the more advanced file formats/codecs. There are 3 important video types which are supported by HTML5: MP4, WebM, and Ogg/Ogv. The MPEG-4 file type is generally encoded in H.264 which allows for playback in third party Flash players. This means you don’t need to keep a .flv video copy to support a fallback method! WebM and Ogg are two much newer file types related to HTML5 video. Ogg uses Theora encoding which is based on the open-source standard audio file format. These can be saved with a .ogg or .ogv extension.

WebM is a project put out by Google which you can read more about on the WebM Project website. The format is already supported by Opera, Google Chrome, Firefox 4+, and most recently Internet Explorer 9. It’s still unknown by most web professionals but WebM is the leading video media format in the future of web video.

2. Browser Support

So which of these file types do you need for your website? Well ideally all 3 would be great as they provide the full support spectrum. Yet this isn’t realistic, and in fact, you can cover all the bases with only two of them. Here is a breakdown of what works for each browser:

• Mozilla Firefox – WebM, Ogg
• Google Chrome – WebM, Ogg
• Opera – WebM, Ogg
• Safari – MP4
• Internet Explorer 9 – MP4
• Internet Explorer 6-8 – No HTML5, Flash Only!

If you remember, earlier I mentioned that most flash video players will support MP4 files as long as they’re encoded in H.264. As such, each of these browsers will embed MP4+Flash as a final resort. This means you only need to create two different video formats to support all browsers. MP4 for Safari/IE9 and a choice between WebM or Ogg for the rest.

In my opinion I highly recommend sticking with the WebM format. It has some big names behind the project (namely Google) and has gained a lot of traction in the HTML5 community. Ogg/Ogv will be supported but will most likely lose out in popularity to WebM’s smaller file sizes. You can read a related piece on the future of video on the web written by Sean Golliher.

3. Embedding Simple HTML5 Videos

Let’s now take a look at the syntax required to embed some sample code. All we need is the HTML5 video tag to reference each movie URL.

  <video width="320" height="240" controls autoplay poster="/img/scene-preview.jpg">  <source src="/mov/scene.mp4" type="video/mp4">  <source src="/mov/scene.webm" type="video/webm">  Sorry, your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.  </video>  

Notice the controls and autoplay attributes don’t need to be set with any values. I also included a poster attribute which preloads an image over the video player before streaming. This is a common preview with many web players.

We offer both MP4 and WebM formats internal to the video element. If neither of these can be loaded then we display an error for the user to update their browser.

4. Offering a Flash Fallback

The example above is perfect for all standards-compliant web browsers. Yet we also need to consider that the world is not always at the cutting-edge of technology. We need to support users on older versions of Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and especially Internet Explorer.

The best way to achieve this is through a Flash fallback player. These can be added using the embed or object tags to reference a third party .swf file. JW Player and Flowplayer are two free open source solutions you can consider. But also check out premium video players on ActiveDen which can go as cheap as $15-$20.

Now let’s tweak the code above to include a fallback Flash player to support nearly every browser in existence.

  <video width="320" height="240" controls autoplay poster="/img/scene-preview.jpg">  <source src="/mov/scene.mp4" type="video/mp4">  <source src="/mov/scene.webm" type="video/webm">    <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="/mov/player.swf"  width="320" height="240">      <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true">      <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always">      <param name="flashvars" value="file=/mov/scene.mp4">      <!--[if IE]><param name="movie" value="/mov/player.swf"><![endif]-->      <img src="/img/scene-preview.jpg" width="320" height="240" alt="Video">      <p>Sorry but your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.</p>    </object>  </video>  

5. Mobile Device Support

This topic is still highly debated since the mobile industry is so young. Apple came out with support for MP4 on Mac and iOS devices. This means you can natively stream .mp4 video files on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch in the standard video UI. This covers a lot of the market share.

Recently Android devices were having a difficult time getting to this same level of support. However Google has finally adopted .mp4 web streaming which now capitalizes on nearly all mobile users. And since Flash isn’t an option here MP4 is the best solution available. This is why you want to embed the .mp4 code first so that iOS devices can recognize the file immediately.

6. Safari User Agent

One bug that must be mentioned is one existing between Flash players and native HTML5 .mp4 streaming on Safari. Since the browser can support both files, you may have trouble getting the HTML5 video stream in place of Flash. However thanks to this great blog post on TUAW it’s easy to change your browsing user agent.

This will force your webpage to recognize the browser as running on another device. Most likely you would choose iPad, which does NOT support any Flash playback. This is the only major issue you may run into when testing MP4 native & flash playback methods.

7. Manage Player Controls

Believe it or not there are also methods you can use to manipulate HTML5 video player controls. It can all be done in JavaScript by pulling from a set of open methods. There are way too many to list out here, but try to skim through the W3C media element docs for more details.

To give you a general idea, the Opera dev blog has posted some short tutorials which are great for newbies. Even if you’ve never picked up JavaScript or jQuery before, it’s still simple to hit the ground running with this one. You can call on specific attributes of the video media such as muted or currentTime. Then you could perform actions (dim the background, display ads) based on these criteria by manipulating the DOM in jQuery.

The same developer in the Opera article provides a working demo of their scripted video player. The opportunity to customize your own UI controls is outstanding. It just goes to show how powerful HTML5 video is becoming.

8. Video Format Conversion

This is another big issue which will likely confuse less tech-savvy individuals. You just want to get your website up and streaming and now you have to deal with converting videos? Well it’s actually not all that difficult.

To deal with MP4 which is your biggest priority, you can use HandBrake which is a free, open source solution which runs on all 3 major OS. It’ll support H.264 along with a few other codecs which makes this the best option for freebie users. If you have the money to shell out I must recommend Xilisoft converter which is on the Mac App Store for only a $40 lifetime license.

It’s looking like the WebM route makes life a lot easier. Miro Video Converter is a free tool for Windows and OS X which produces great quality WebM files. It can also do Ogg Theora encoding which comes out with pretty great quality as well.

9. Building a Web Player

Video formats with HTML5 specs are still new to developers. There are open protocols just waiting to be played with to allow for custom controls, sliders, play/pause icons, etc. If you are feeling bold, check out this tutorial on how to make your own HTML5 player (published on Splashnology).

The code is a bit intense for newcomers as it requires advanced CSS targeting and a bit of formal jQuery. There are other frameworks you can build on which already offer a customized player design. Similarly this slideshare presentation is a great introduction to building an HTML5 video player.

10. VideoJS Library

VideoJS is probably my favorite solution to HTML5 video players. All you need is their self-hosted JavaScript and CSS stylesheet included somewhere in your document. Then you write the standard HTML5 video code with some additional classes for skinning. I added their sample code below:

  <video class="video-js vjs-default-skin" controls preload="auto"    width="640" height="264" poster="my_video_poster.png" data-setup="{}">    <source src="my_video.mp4" type="video/mp4">    <source src="my_video.webm" type="video/webm">  </video>  

If you happen to run a WordPress blog you can also try their custom WP plugin. It will automatically include the library js/css on pages where you display HTML5 video. And you can do this from within any post or page editor using shortcodes( see here).

Conclusion

I hope this introductory guide can stir your interest in the future of web video. With more users turning to mobile it’s important that HTML5 standards are adopted for these types of media. The Web should be made simpler so that developers can produce fully-supported solutions much quicker. We would love to hear your ideas and suggestions for the future of HTML5 video. If you’d like to share please feel free to leave a comment in the post discussion area below.

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