Battery Saver is one of Windows Phone’s core apps – according to your personal preferences, it can be on at all times or kick in when there’s less than 20%Â of battery left doing everything possible to make it last longer. It makes this happen by turning off notifications, reducing screen brightness, disabling cellular connectivity, certain app background tasks and other non-essential processes.
The key here is not only to expand your phone’s battery life, but also do it without limiting certain capabilities you may need to have turned on at all times. Enabling Battery Saver with its default settings can certainly make your battery last longer between recharges, but it also disables several features, therefore limiting your phone’s functionality. The only way to make Battery Saver’s behavior fit your needs is to manually configure it, and here’s how you can accomplish that.
1. Open up Battery Saver from the Apps list or from its Live Tile if you have it pinned on the Start Screen.
2. In the Settings pane, the app shows you a few statistics, namely battery life remaining, estimated time remaining and time since last charge. In the ‘Conserve battery life’ section you can select when Battery Saver becomes enabled, which can be never, always and when battery goes below 20%. You can also make a setting have effect only until the next charge by enabling the related option.
3. Swipe left to go the Usage pane. Here you can see how much your apps consume in use and for background tasks. You can customize the displayed list by showing apps with usage, all apps and apps that can run in the background as well as usage for the last 24 hours, 48 hours or week.
4. If you tap on any app displayed in the list you can open up its own settings window. From here you can turn off/on the ‘Allow app to run in the background’ option according to your needs. An app that shows a Live Tile with regularly updated information will need to have permission to run in the background, otherwise the Live Tile won’t receive updates.
For this reason, Battery Saver also lets you allow an app to run in the background even when Battery Saver is on. For example, a clock tile needs the ability to update itself if you want it to always show the current time and the same goes if you want real-time updates for news feeds, social apps and so on.
Manually setting up the general behavior of Battery Saver and customizing permissions for each app that can run in the background, will only improve battery performance if you’ve taken steps in that direction. Nevertheless, it will offer you a personalized experience that won’t limit or disable features you actually want to be turned on at all times.
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