While the Nexus 6 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 Nexus 6 includes lots of settings and features to help your battery last as long as you do. Here are some tips and tricks:
The Screen
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, and the Nexus 6 is no slouch in the pixel count department. 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 lowering the brightness slider.
- Keep your screen from using too much battery by keeping the Screen Timeout set low. You can edit this setting by going to the Settings app, tapping the Display menu, then picking a time limit in the Sleep menu.
- A darker wallpaper will help your battery life as well. More pixels at a lower brightness means less power is being used. To learn how to change your wallpaper, check out our article Nexus 6 Home Screen Tips & Tricks.
The Radios
The latest and greatest devices come equipped with the latest and greatest wireless technologies. That’s what makes it a cell phone, right? Unfortunately, with every new kind of wireless connectivity, you also add a new drain to your battery life. Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, and GPS are all amazing and useful tools, and they all use power.
- Turn off unused network modes. If your carrier doesn’t use LTE, then neither should you: it’s a battery hog. Unless you’re doing something data intensive like downloading photos or watching videos, it’s safe to keep LTE off. To turn off LTE on your Nexus 6:
- In the Settings app, tap on More under Wireless & networks.
- Tap on the Cellular networks menu.
- Tap on Preferred network type and select 3G or Global (selection depends on your carrier).
- 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 both using quick toggles in the Notification Drawer. Check out our article How to Use Quick Settings on the Nexus 6.
- Unless you’re getting navigation directions or playing a game that requires your exact location, GPS can also be turned off using quick toggles.
The Apps
The next biggest battery drain on your Nexus 6 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 under the Device section of the Settings app, then tapping on Application Manager and swiping over to the Running page. This shows a list of currently running tasks and applications, and and overview of the RAM currently being used. As a general rule (although not always the case), apps using more RAM are also using more power.
- You can close currently running apps by opening up the Recents carousel by clicking the square navigation icon at the bottom of your screen and swiping the app away to the left or right.
- 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 the Nexus 6.
Extra Measures
If all the previous measures aren’t enough, the Nexus 6 brings one more feature to help you get the maximum from your Nexus 6’s battery life:
To help improve battery life, battery saver reduces your device’s performance and limits vibration, ambient display, location services, and most background data. Email, messaging, and other apps that rely on syncing may not update unless you open them.
Battery saver turns off automatically when your device is charging.
To turn on Battery Saver mode:
- Tap on the Battery menu in the Settings app. Here you see an overview of your battery life over time and usage by feature or app.
- Tap on the menu icon (three dots) in the top right of the screen, then tap on Battery Saver.
- You can turn on Battery Saver manually using the toggle to the right, or you can tap Turn on automatically to set Battery Saver to automatically disable at a specified battery level.
