Power Tune-Up. Use this app to Manage Battery & Data consumption on Android
by Paul Wilks
Apr 11, 2012 8:13 AM –
Install
Power Tune-Up allows you to manage and optimize the battery consumption of your Android handset. The app features a slew of useful tools to get the most out of your battery. From time to time we pretty much all run out of battery at some point in our lives with smartphones, so it’s good that there are apps available to help us avoid that situation. Developer BitDefender has created a few security/management apps, but this one struck me as being a great option for most smartphone users.
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC Desire HD
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Manage and optimize the battery consumption!
- Variety of different functions!
- Great user interface!
- Easy to understand and implement!
Cons
- When optimizing there perhaps isn’t enough info that tells you exactly what’s being done, and no simple path back.
- Tells you there’s cache to clean when there isn’t.
Features:
When you open up Power Tune-Up you are met with a slick-looking and professional interface, nice to see in a free app. You have 4 options on the main screen: Battery saver, Clean-up, Data Meter and Send Feedback. Leaving the pretty-much self-explanatory last option, I’ll go through the others and their features.
Battery saver
Initially this gives you a list of ‘Device options’; things that have a specific impact on your battery. These include Wi-Fi, Screen brightness, Bluetooth and so on… Beside each is a nifty toggle for switching these on and off. By scrolling the wheel at the top of the screen you next get ‘Economy Options’. These too are toggles for battery low notification, night time battery saver, Battery saver mode when below 30% and Display time remaining in widget. These are simple to control and intuitive, and I shall get on to the widget later. Then you have ‘CPU’ which lists your running programs and what essentially is a kill button next to each. Finally you have a ‘RAM’ list of apps which are using your RAM, again these have a kill button next to them.
At the top of the screen you have a toggle to switch to battery saver mode. This is a pre-set configuration to make the very most from your battery. It removes practically everything it can to preserve power. This is however, customisable, but I wish it would at least explain what it removes. In a nutshell, your device goes almost dark with no Wi-Fi, without data, 15 second timeout, etc. This was the key frustration I had, sometimes you want to save battery as best as you can but not want to sacrifice literally everything. Hugely annoying is the fact there’s no way back, you have to manually reset everything to how it was before. 
Clean-up
Clean-up is a tool that scans your device for places to save cache memory, both in on your device and SD card. After analysis you can select to ‘clean-all’ or look closer at what app caches are being cleaned up. This is petty good, clears up and space is relatively painless, but I was sometimes told there was something to clean, went with clean-all only to be told there was nothing to clean after all. Odd, but this is a Beta release so I’m certain this issues will be umm.. cleaned up. 
Data Meter
This allows you to set how much data you’re permitted by your carrier to better manage your usage. Once set, and I liked the fact you can set it for a future date, it provides you with a graph which plots your usage. There is also a warning bar should you begin to run your data down. Pretty handy. 
I should finally mention there are little tutorial ‘?’ everywhere so if in any doubt, these will explain the screen content to you.
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Main menu
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Battery saver
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Clean up
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Scanning
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Device optimized
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Bitdefender – Power Tune-Up
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Saved storage
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Performing clean-up
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Manage data usage
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Intro 1
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Intro 2
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Intro 3
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Intro 4
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Bitdefender Power Tune-up – Intro 5
Usefulness:
I think I’m relatively lucky in that I’m rarely away from a spot where I can’t charge my device. Most of the time it just sits in a cradle. Fearing the ‘running out of battery problem‘ I even went so far as to buy an extra battery to just be able to switch when I exhaust the one in my phone. However, seemingly quite a few top-end phones now are coming out with batteries that cannot be removed (or at least removed with any ease)- for example the Motorola RAZR and the HTC One X. Apps like this can save the pain of running out of battery when you most need it. It’s not something I foresee myself using regularly, but it’ll be a lifesaver when I do.
Add to this the fact the app comes with a handy widget, see pic above. This is a basic battery widget, but will also tell you how long you have left before it runs out.
Ease of Use:
Power Tune-Up is very easy to use. The only issue I really felt it had was with transparency over what exactly is entailed when switching to the automated battery-saving mode. You can tweak and change things but it’s a pain to have to re-engage things like brightness, haptic feedback and screen timeout manually.
Frequently Used:
This could easily be a daily-use app for some people. Personally I’ll perhaps only every use it once in a while, but it’ll be useful at the time.
Interface:
The interface is really good, very slick and easy to understand. It looks highly professional and, with the toggle system and configuration wheel at the top, very polished indeed.
Tags:
Android App,
Android Apps,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Battery Power Saving App,
Bitdefender,
How to Extend Android Battery Life,
JuiceDefender,
Optimization,
Power Tune-Up,
Save Battery Power,
security
Categorised in: Tools, Utilities
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