Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Wearables impacting a growing condition called BAD!


With all of these new wearable devices coming out of the woodwork (watches, glasses, fitness gear, etc), a growing condition; I call BAD (Battery Anxiety Disorder), seems to be getting much worse.

While my kids will probably kill me for posting this, the anxiety they have over their smartphones and tablets losing power is real.  My daughter Nicole seriously starts to panic when her iPhone gets below 70%. She constantly recharges her device to make sure it is topped off at 100% before leaving the house and even knows when it is at a low 100% or a high 100% (sounds strange, but they know).  If she walks out of the door for school at 99%, the panic for her next charge starts to kick in.  She tells me how the kids at school find strategic times and places to charge up during the day.

During our last car ride to North Carolina, my kids were almost fighting over the use of the in car charger.  The bargaining that was going on to juice up their phones was intense and at many times downright mean.

How is this going to play out as the new devices enter the marketplace?  As the desire to carry fewer chargers will never be met, we all must get use to the inevitable new world of power management.  

As crazy as it sounds, it wouldn’t surprise me if schools don’t cover this eventually.

As I started giving Nicole some tips to better manage her power, I realized some of these may not actually be known by all, so here goes:

  • Dim your screen. Most people know this one.  I don’t even know how some folks can see their barely lit screens.
  • Shut off background apps.  Depending on the device OS (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc) you need to shut down apps that may be running and polling for updates. I forget to do this one many times and find my fully charged device almost dead by morning.
  • Hit the suspend button when fished (typically tapping the on/off button). This will turn off the screen immediately versus waiting for your screen timeout to kick in.
  • Shut down or pause GPS.  Again, depending on the device you might find this a pain in the neck. There are a few 3rd party apps for each platform that might make it a quicker task.  This one tends to drain my devices battery very fast.
  • Notifications from applications can also be a big drainer if you have a ton of connections and updates happening 24/7 from apps.  Think about the ones you really need and set up only those.

Note:  Many more power saving tips are searchable on the internet, but might require more user interaction (temporarily disabling and enabling wi-fi, Bluetooth, etc).

Devices have also emerged on the market to relieve many immediate needs to re-power devices quickly.  This one was just invented by a teen and should be on the market shortly:



Good luck controlling your BAD!
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