Battery Extender is a power management app that aims to squeeze as much power from your phone’s battery as possible by tuning or turning off some of the phone’s features that would otherwise be draining your precious juice. We’ve been testing it out on our Nokia N97, so find out whether we managed to do more on the move with our Battery Extender review…

Battery Extender allow you can use one of four preset battery profiles – Max Battery, Outdoor Sports, Improved Battery and Original Settings or switch to a custom profile of your own devising. All the presets can be tweaked too, should you have any unusual requirements.

The first thing to note is that reading the application’s Help page is pretty much impossible when you are on the full-blown ‘Max Battery’ setting. No sooner have your eyes focused on the text than Battery Extender shuts down that wasteful LCD display. Still, at least we know it is working.

Looking into each profile to see what it turns off is quite illuminating (or not, in the case of the backlight). Everything from Bluetooth to the screen auto-rotate will use an amount of power and Battery Extender will let whether these functions are allowed to run, and for how long. The level of tweakery is quite impressive – you can opt to have certain features be active only when you have more than a few pips worth of power, or for the backlight to dim when the battery starts running on empty.

About those presets – Max Battery is the full-on hardcore power saving option. As many things are turned off as possible, the backlight is dim as a Sunday Sport subscriber and turns itself off almost before it is on. Improved Battery is rather more sane and only really turns on the thumbscrews when you get down to a pip or two. Outdoor Sports is set to maximise power while still leaving the GPS turned up to the max so you can run apps like Sports Tracker. Original Settings is the ‘return to default’ profile and cannot be edited.

Although the presets are well thought out as far as they go, it would have been nice to have a few more – how about a ‘weekend away’ profile or one optimised for ebook reading? True, they can be customised but you can’t save your changes as a new profile and create new use cases.

We noticed a definite improvement in our battery life when using the Improved Battery profile – hitting a single pip is usually a sign that we need to charge ASAP but we were able to stretch out the standby time much longer than usual. Max Battery is probably best left to emergencies when you will be away from power for long periods and have to squeeze out every second. If we ever take up cross-country running, we’ll let you know how the GPS thing works out.

In conclusion, Battery Extender does what it says it will do. A few more options and the ability to save profiles would make this a must buy, but as it stands the app is definitely worth a look.

Details
Version: 1.10.0
Price: Free 14-day trial, £8.00 full version
DOWNLOAD: Battery Extender

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