App review: Battery Extender for S60

For all the changes we have seen in smartphones over the years, battery life is the one that seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Battery Extender is an application that promises to eek more life from your battery by automatically closing progams or hardware features, or adjusting backlight settings depending on how much charge you have remaining.

The effectiveness of Battery Extender ultimately depends on how battery-aware you are in the first place. For our initial test we simply set it up on our phone and left it to see what happened. in truth, little did, largely because we already were in the habit of manually closing programs when they weren’t being used, and keeping power draining features like Bluetooth and GPS switched off when not needed.

But in doing this we also encountered some problems. We set the app to deactivate GPS when there was only three bars of power remaining, and then promptly forgot all about.

When the GPS subsequently failed to work we feared the worst for the phone, until it dawned that the Battery Extender settings cannot be over-ridden and we would need to change the profile (and reboot the phone) in order to get GPS working again with only a small amount of charge remaining.

It’s nice that the app is so unobtrusive that you won’t even remember it is there, but it is quite uncompromising in how rigidly it sticks to its settings – some capacity to manually override them would improve the program significantly.

Where we found Battery Extender to be properly effective was in saving the last dredges of power from the battery, when you can’t recharge the phone and need to ensure it remains alive for emergencies.

The program is highly configurable, and benefits from being set up according to how you use your phone, although some element of auto-profiling based on this would be desirable in future versions.

As it is, Battery Extender’s worth depends on how far you want to configure it, how often you are away from an external power supply. And if, like us, your phone is almost never fully charged you do need to be careful that it doesn’t adversely affect your user experience in the process.

Web: www.battery-extender.com
Price: $14.99

Verdict: 5/10

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