Extend your Mobile Phone's battery life

Want to use less energy and get more battery life out of your mobile phone? Here are our top 5 tips on how to reduce your mobile phones carbon footprint.

Turn your phone off!
It may sound silly, but how many times do you turn your phone off when you go to bed at night? Chances are you’ve not had many phone calls in the middle of the night, so by turning your phone off when you go to bed, and back on again in the morning, you’re saving 8 hours a day of battery life and could extend your battery life by a few days.

Turn off Bluetooth.
Bluetooth only needs to be turned on when you need it – by leaving it turned on all day your phone is constantly looking for other Bluetooth devices and draining your battery.

Turn off GPRS, 3G & WiFi.
If you never use the internet on your mobile, you won’t notice any difference by turning GPRS and 3G off – other than having to charge your phone less! If you do use Internet on your phone through either 3G or WiFi, turn them on as and when you need them, other wise they’ll be consuming power searching for networks when there is no need.

Adjust the display.
Manufacturers normally set the screen to its brightest setting to make it look clearer. This only drains power, adjust the settings and dim the screen to a level that you can still see, but is no brighter than it needs to be. Change the screen saver settings too, set it to come on sooner – reducing the time the screen is lit up for.

Leave it alone!
We’re all guilty of it, we get bored, nervous, need to look busy, so we pick up our phones and start fiddling with them. We’re not doing anything on them, only draining the battery. Put it down and find something else to play with!

First Impressions of the LG KF600

This weekend I decided to take a break from my Nokia N82 and spend a little time with the LG KF600.

The KF600 is the latest handset from the Korean manufacturer and is trying to change the way that we use our phones with the introduction of its “InteractPad”.

The phone looks stylish, is a decent size and weight and feels well built. The one thing you notice immediately is the lack of keys on the front of the phone. The KF600 is a touch phone, but with a twist. Rather than having a large touch screen display that drains battery power, the screen has been split into two parts, the display and the InteractPad.

The InteractPad is a unique way of using your phone, from the standby screen you have 6 touch sensitive keys, and as you move through the different screens of the phone, these buttons move and adapt to suit the application you’re using. In some cases I found the InteractPad to be a bit awkward, but in other applications it works really well.

I tend to use my phone mainly for photo’s, music, email, internet and texting rather than making calls. The camera on the KF600 is a 3 megapixel and has an LED flash. Photo’s come out clear and pretty sharp, and if you print them out they will be of a decent quality at 6″ x 4″ size. The flash is ok for taking photo’s in low light close up, but if what you’re taking photo’s of is more than a metre away, it probably won’t be much use.

The KF600 works really well as an MP3 player. There’s a dedicated shortcut key on the side of the phone for quick access and I found it easy to transfer tracks to the phone using Bluetooth or the data cable and software that came with it. The music interface is probably the best use of the InteractPad, you have the usual play/pause, forward and rewind, as well as a track progress bar. Normally these just scroll along with no purpose, but with the interact pad you can simply drag the slider to get to the part of the track you want – great if you want to skip sections of podcasts.

Email and texting works well too. Predictive text meant writing messages is quick and easy, and setting up POP3 email was very straight forward. The only thing I found to be not so great here was the handwriting recognition. In theory it sounds great, but in reality, writing with the end of your finger just isn’t accurate enough, and for hardcore texters, you’ll be able to text using the keypad a lot faster.

Internet access on the KF600 is pretty standard, it runs off a GPRS connection, so a fairly slow connection, but if you just want to check the odd train time or find out what’s on at the cinema then it does the job with no problem at all.

Overall the KF600 is a good all round handset. It will take a little getting used to with the InteractPad, and for the first few days I can guarantee you’ll be touching the top half of the screen and wondering why nothing is happening, but give it a week and you’ll be flying through the menus, but once you’ve got used to the interact pad, you may struggle to go back to a conventional phone.