Tweaks to improve your phone's performance

For the average person, a smartphone is but another piece of fancy innovation that has a purpose - whether it's making phone calls, browsing the internet on the go, sending emails, or a bit of everything.

You see, the smartphone isn't treated in the same way as a PC because it doesn't feel like one, nevertheless essentially a smartphone is just a PC in a very small space.

What this means is that - like a PC - a smartphone can freeze and crash, get clogged up with rubbish afterwards a period of installing apps and general use, and can slow down as a result. As with a laptop, the battery never seems to last even half as long as the manufacturer says it does.

Unlike computers, which we've been tinkering with for years in order to make them perform better, a smartphone is a relatively new beast and as such it doesn't get the same sort of attention.

However, with some simple tips and tricks, you can improve the performance of your phone, making it more responsive, and you can make the battery last twice as long as it does now. If you've got an iPhone or Windows Phone 7 mobile, read on.

The occasion when your battery is most at risk of going flat is when you're using it all the time. Sounds obvious - and it is - nevertheless short of turning your phone off altogether, which isn't as a matter of fact a bad idea if you're not planning to use it for a few hours, you can optimise your time with it by adjusting the thing that drains it most: the screen.

The brightness taken care of

With the brightness taken care of, the then thing you'll want to do is sort out your phone's sleeping habits. Like a laptop, a phone will give you a lot more if you make sure you're not leaving it to idle for minutes or even hours.

On a Windows Phone 7 device or an iPhone, all you need to do to quickly put it into standby mode is press the button at the top of the phone. It's a pretty basic thing to say, however it's all too easy to use your phone, chuck it in your pocket and wait for the screen to time out. If you tend to do this, you can stop it draining your battery by reducing the amount of time that should pass earlier your phone automatically goes into standby.

When you're at home it's even quicker thanks to the convenience of easily being able to connect to your Wi-Fi network, however both means of accessing the internet can be huge contributors to your phone's battery usage. When you're not planning to go online, simply turn them off to maximise your battery life.

Don't forget about Bluetooth as so then - if this is turned on it'll constantly be searching for Bluetooth-enabled devices within reach, which will eat your battery. Turning off these radios will as well allow your phone to react more quickly to your inputs because it's not constantly dealing with other processing requests.

On both the iPhone and Windows Phone 7 platforms, you can easily turn off all these features with a single tap thanks to Airplane mode, found in the Settings menu. If you've got no signal definitely, you might as so then.

While having lots of apps installed on your smartphone isn't a problem and won't degrade performance, keeping certain apps running in the background during you get on with other tasks isn't such a good idea, and can affect your phone's speed and battery life. Closing them may appear to fix this, nevertheless when you exit an app it won't fully close.

Instead, it sits in the background quietly sipping away at your resources - only you won't be able to see it. Some good apps are fully paused in the background so you needn't worry about them, however some bad apps like mapping services or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) will happily work away in the background.

The thing is

The thing is, not everyone wants to be constantly opening and removing apps as they're needed, and if you use your phone quite often this could become a pain. Instead, you should keep your most commonly used apps running in the background and only quit those that you rarely use. At that time you can optimise your favourite open apps by changing specifically what they get up to behind the scenes.

Location services aren't the only feature that can affect your phone's battery life - push notifications and data fetching can have a significant impact on it too. Push notifications alert you when something happens in an app, like someone inviting you to an event on Facebook or an eBay auction coming to a close. Fetching data has the same sort of effect by downloading data at specific intervals, like when your mail application checks for new emails.

Windows Phone 7 mobile

If you're using a Windows Phone 7 mobile, you'll be pleased to hear that you can turn off these draining notifications in one easy step if you don't want any interruptions. Simply go into 'Settings' and tap the 'Battery saver' option. You can either turn it on now, or you can select the option that only brings it on when your phone's battery is low.

The quickest and easiest way of clearing all your texts on an iPhone is to select each of the recipients in your inbox and at that time delete the messages one person at a time.

Another great way to give your phone a spring clean is to remove all the information that you've picked up along the way during you're browsing the internet. Temporary files, cookies and other little cached trinkets can slow things down, so clean this regularly to keep things running smoothly.

Music lover

If you're a music lover, one easy way to improve your phone's battery life is to keep your sounds in check. First things first, make sure you're not listening to music during you're in the middle of other tasks, as this will reduce your battery's life. If you actually must listen to some tunes, at the time turn down the volume a little.

More importantly, turn off the EQ settings if you've got an iPhone, or if it's a Windows Phone 7 device go into the Sound Enhancer app and keep make sure audio is set to 'No effects'.

Worst case scenario - completely unresponsive

When your phone has become slow or - in a worst case scenario - completely unresponsive, you can try speeding things up once again by simply restarting it.

In the iPhone's case you can do a standard reset, which involves holding the power button down and flicking across on the Slide to the 'Power off' prompt. The same applies to the Windows Phone 7 device, nevertheless you need to flick down instead.

If that doesn't help, you can - on the iPhone anyway - perform a more thorough reset that involves holding down the power and home buttons together for about 15 seconds until it turns off completely. This will remedy a phone in other words not only sluggish, nevertheless has completely frozen.

Tortoise in treacle

If your phone is after all acting slower than a tortoise in treacle, your last resort is to perform a complete reinstall. Earlier you go to those sorts of lengths, remember to back up your phone so that you don't lose any precious data.

This brings us neatly to the question of backing up the data stored on your device - an important area of smartphone maintenance that will make many a mobile user run for the hills due to the sheer amount of time it normally requires. You can dramatically reduce time taken to perform a backup by saving photos manually and placing them on your computer's hard drive previously you start backing up.

The iPhone you'll need to plug in the device

On the iPhone you'll need to plug in the device, browse to the photo location and copy and paste them. At the time, in iTunes, select the device, click the 'Photos' tab at the top menu and enable 'Sync photos from'. Choose the location that you saved your photos to and click 'Apply'.