How to Get the Most From Your HTC One M9 Battery

While the HTC One M9 is perfectly suited to be incredibly capable under heavy usage and multitasking, sometimes you want to eke out every minute you possibly can from the battery. Thankfully, the HTC One M9 includes lots of settings an features to help your battery last as long as you do. Here are some tips and tricks:

Shine Bright Like a Diamond. Or Don’t…

Usually the biggest battery hog on any modern touchscreen device is the screen itself. It takes a lot of juice to power all those thousands of individually lit pixels with different colors and brightnesses. The biggest boost to your battery is to simply keep your screen off as long and as often as possible. When not possible, however, make sure to turn down the screen brightness, or use the automatic brightness setting that sets the screen brightness for you based on available environmental light.

• Turn down your screen’s brightness level through Quick Toggles by dragging down the Notification Drawer, then pulling down once more. Tapping the brightness quick toggle (the one that looks like a sun) will cycle through four brightness settings: low, medium, high, and automatic.
• Keep your screen from using too much battery by keeping the Screen timeout time low. You can edit this setting by going to the Display & gestures menu in the Settings app under the Phone section.
• A darker wallpaper will help your battery life as well. The more pixels at a lower brightness means less power being used.

Radio Killed the Battery Star

I know what you’re thinking, “But I don’t use the radio on my M9!” However, we’re not talking about just the FM radio here: every kind of wireless technology in your HTC One M9 are all based on good old-fashioned radio waves. This includes Bluetooth, 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, and GPS. All of these are radios, and all of them require lots of power to keep turned on and connected.

• Turn off unused network modes. If your carrier doesn’t use LTE, then neither should you: it’s a battery hog. Select your network mode by tapping on Mobile Data in the Settings app and then tapping on Network Mode. Select only the highest mode your carrier supports.
• Wi-Fi uses less battery than LTE (the highest speed data connection carriers provide at the moment), and there’s generally no need to have both on at the same time.
• Keep Bluetooth and NFC turned off unless actively using them. You can turn off Bluetooth right from the toggle in the Settings app, and you can turn off NFC by tapping on More under the Wireless & Networks section, and turn off the switch titled NFC.
• Unless you’re getting navigation directions or playing a game that requires your exact location, GPS can be set to battery saving mode by opening the Location menu in the Settings app, tapping on Mode, and selecting Battery Saving.

Search and Destroy

The next biggest battery drain on your HTC One M9 is simply doing stuff, and doing stuff generally involves using apps. Unfortunately, apps are often running even when you’re not actively using them. Usually they’re working in the background, downloading or listening for changes, or doing some other kind of process. You can help rein in background power consumption of apps with a couple tricks.

• Get a list of currently running apps by tapping on Apps in the Settings app and swiping to the right to the Running tab. This shows apps sorted by RAM usage. As a general rule (although not always the case), apps using more RAM are also using more power.
• You can stop any currently running apps by tapping on the app from the currently running list and tapping on Stop. Be careful that you only stop apps that you ran yourself. Avoid stopping system apps like Google Play Services and any app with an Android icon next to them. Stopping these apps can prevent your HTC One M9 from running properly.
• Close apps from the Recent Apps multitasking pane. Check out our article How to Use Multitasking on HTC One M9 to learn more.
• Another potential battery hog is notifications. The more apps that use and send notifications, the more battery is used, from both getting the notification itself, and new notifications turning on the screen when it’s off. Check out our article How to Manage Notifications on HTC One M9.

Extreme Measures

If all the previous measures aren’t enough, the HTC One M9 brings even more power saving features. Check them out:

• Turn on Power Saver mode. This mode automatically turns on power saving features and turns off other features that drains battery.  There are to ways to turn Power Saver mode on: open the Power menu in the Settings app and turn on the Power Saver toggle, or tap on the Saver toggle in Quick Toggles.
  • Power Saver mode can be customized by tapping on the name next to the Power Saver toggle in the Power menu of the Settings app. You can choose to turn on or off four settings: CPU Power, which reduces the power available to the CPU; Display reduces screen brightness; Vibration disables the vibration motor in the phone; and Data Connection turns off high speed data when the screen is off.
• Turn on Sleep Mode in the Power menu of the Settings app. This setting will turn off data connectivity after your phone is off and inactive for a while.
• Extreme Power Saving mode, is as the name implies, an extremely battery-conservative mode you can put your phone in. EPS turns off as many features as possible and locks down lots of functionality. When in this mode, you are limited to a handful of apps: Phone, Messages, Mail, Calendar, Calculator, and Clock; and turns off unneeded data connections and any sync or notification services.
  • Turn on Extreme Power Saving mode by either the EXT Saver toggle in quick toggles, or the Extreme Power Saving Mode toggle in the Power menu of the Settings app.
  • EPS can be configured to engage automatically at a certain battery level by tapping the name Extreme Power Saving Mode next to the toggle in the Power menu of the Settings app.

For more HTC One M9 Tips and tricks, check out our HTC One M9 Tips & Tricks Roundup