How many widgets is too many?

[PD63]

Howdy fellow MAXX users,

I've been perusing the forums and I'm a bit perplexed. My battery (yes, another battery post), is not lasting nearly as long as others that I've seen posted and I attribute this to my multitude of widgets that update frequently. I was wondering if you could riddle me this:

Do you use widgets on your phone, and if so, which ones / how many?

To illustrate what I'm using:

"Favorite Contacts"
"Calendar (2x1)"
"Drive (3x1)"
"Google Now (2x1)"
"Google Keep (2x2)"

-P

 

[B. Diddy]

It's true that widgets can contribute to battery use, especially the ones that need frequent updating. I feel that most widgets on the phone are not that helpful, mostly because of the small screen. For example, who really uses the YouTube widget to scroll through selected videos? How useful are the Facebook or Google+ widgets, since they only show a few lines of a person's status at a time? Even something like the stock photo gallery widget isn't that useful, since you can't expand it to fill the whole screen. The widgets you list shouldn't use up too much battery, except maybe Google Now. The only widgets I use are DIGI Clock and the My Verizon data usage widget. I think Google Keep and Google Music are useful widgets, but I don't use either enough to keep them on my homescreen.

Regarding battery usage in general, there are many factors that contribute. Here are some of my recommendations:

1. Keep the screen brightness set manually to the minimum level needed.
2. Use static wallpapers instead of live ones.
3. Keep wifi, Bluetooth, and mobile data off unless you need them. Install a good toggle app like Power Toggles to make it easy to turn these off or on.
4. If you don't need constant web updates for your various apps, set all of the data refresh intervals for your apps (like Facebook, weather apps, news apps, etc.) to manual or to the least frequent interval available. Frequent data refreshes eat battery.
5. Turn off Location Reporting in Google Maps by opening Maps, tapping the menu button and then Settings/Location Settings, and then turning off Location Reporting. This is used primarily for Latitude, and causes Maps to execute partial wake locks many times during the day, which can drain battery.
6. Install Wake Lock Detector and wait about a day before running it to find out which apps are causing the phone to wake up, either fully or partially, to do some kind of process. This is how I found out about #5.
7. If you don't use Google Currents, disable it. If you do, change the refresh interval to manual. Currents has been identified as a big battery hog.
8. Some antivirus/security apps use more power than others. I found that Avast used significantly more battery than Lookout.