Category Archives: Week 16 Part 2

A Battery Extending App That Actually Works?

At last, we are finally here, it is the last blog of the semester. It really is bittersweet because what I thought would be a pain ended up being fun in the end because I discovered that I have fun when I write these. For the last article, I had to go to my favorite website, which as mentioned, I will post at the end of this post. This article is about an app that extends battery life, and I am just as skeptical as you probably are because battery life extenders are usually never legit. However, this article says that scientists have found a “novel” way of extending battery life by an hour everyday.

Okay so after reading this article, I’ve discovered that this app is for android only, and I have an IPhone so this is absolutely useless to me, but for my android peasa…. I mean friends out there, this is the app for you apparently.

So android has this neat little feature in which a user can have multiple windows or apps open on the screen at the same time. (Which i guess is cool, but like why do you need that many things on a tiny android screen.) This feature apparently kills battery though, but after this app is installed, that energy drain will be a thing of the past. The app created by Kshirasagar Naik, co-author of the study and a professor in Waterloo’s faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, reduces the brightness of non-critical applications. In other words, it will dim the other windows that you aren’t using at at that moment.

As much as I don’t like android, this app showed results. The study was done on 200 smartphone users, and it showed that users with the app downloaded extended their battery life by 10-25%. Numbers do not lie my friends.

This was a pretty straightforward article so it isn’t my favorite article ever obviously, but I did really enjoy it for the same reason. It was straight and to the point, thus making it very short. Although, what I don’t understand is if a window is “non-critical” why is it even open in the first place? I’m convinced it is so Android users can flex on IPhone users more without their battery dying from having that many windows open. In all seriousness though, some people probably actually use multiple windows, but may just not need one at the time so the app is a really good idea. Overall, this was a good read, and if you have an Android, download MultiDroid to start saving your battery.

And that’ll do it. It has truly been a pleasure to review articles for you guys, I don’t believe I will be continuing to write these articles, but who knows, maybe I will come back. But here is the link to my source for my readers out there.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/computers_math/software/

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.