How to make the most of battery and data usage on your Lumia

Get the most out of your Lumia with the clever Battery Sense and Data Sense features packed into the heart of your smartphone.

We’ve all run into data or battery challenges before. The built-in features for tracking data and battery usage will help you avoid these situations and make the most out of your Lumia.

Battery Sense 

Find out which apps are running in the background with the built-in Battery Saver feature, which lets you conserve your smartphone’s battery between charges. When you turn on Battery Saver, your Lumia automatically turns off some of the features that use battery in the background, such as e-mail and calendar updates, live tiles updates and other apps that are not open.

Additionally, it also tells you which apps are consuming the most power and if you wish to allow them to run in the background.

Turn off non-essential features

Here’s how you can put to rest the apps that you don’t often use and set conditions on a per-app basis to conserve your Lumia’s battery.

• In the App list, tap Battery Saver.
• Now, swipe over to ‘Usage’ to see a list of your apps and their relative battery consumption.
• Select the app from the list, then turn on ‘Allow app to run in the background’ option or turn it off as per choice.

Next, you can pin Battery to your Start screen and view the status of your battery percentage. This is handy when you quickly need to know how much juice is left in your Lumia!

You can even set different types of alerts (battery charging full, when it is discharging quickly or low status).

Data Sense- Keeping tab on data usage

If you are addicted to your Lumia and have a limited data plan, you might have a problem staying within your limits.. Thanks to Data Sense, you can control data usage successfully.

By offering a detailed breakdown of data usage on your Windows Phone, Data Sense alerts you when you’re nearing your mobile data limit. Pin the Data Sense app to your Start screen to see at a glance your data usage stats so you can avoid extra cost.

Tracking your data usage 

Here’s how you can set up Data Sense:

• In theApp list, select Data Sense then tap Set limit.
• Under theLimit type option, choose one of the following: Pre-paid for a limited amount of data with an expiry date, Monthly for a limited of data usage each month and Unlimited with no limit on data but for tracking usage.
• Tap Done.

The trick is to select the data amount closer to your monthly cap so that you can get timely alerts. There you go, I saved 50 MB of data before the expiration of my data connection and didn’t incur any additional costs.

Further, you can conserve data by limiting the amount of background data being sent when you’re nearing your limit, like an email app that regularly fetches new messages.

Under the Data Sense option, select Settings < turn on Restrict background data and you are done.

Additionally, reduce the amount of data when you browse the Web by opting for the ‘Automatic’ option under the Browser data savings.

Have you made use of these Sense features yet? Share with us in the comments below.