[LG Nitro HD] mattman86:
All,

In case you haven't noticed, the battery life of the Nitro HD is kinda bad... Then, when you add ICS into the mix, it gets worse.

When i first flashed the Leaked ICS ROM, I noticed that I was only getting about 8 to 9 hours of battery life with very light use. So, I endeavored to find a way to extend that time without buying an expensive extended battery.

Here are my findings:

GPS

Settings > Location Services

Now we all like the convenience of being able to pull out our phone and find the nearest gas station or fine dining experience. But when you think about it, in our day to day lives, we don't need directions that much.

GPS and Location Services are huge data and energy hogs. If you have ever seen how much can go on in the background when it comes to Location Services, you would cringe. So, set up your GPS like the screenshot below and you will see a little battery life improvement and data usage go down.

Display Brightness

Settings > Display > Brightness

On my Nitro, the display uses up the most energy by far. So, it only makes sense to lower the brightness a bit to save power.

Developer Options

Settings > Developer Options

The Nitro has a powerful 1.5GHz CPU which uses a ton of energy when in heavy use. Some of you might say, "But Matt, I don't use that many apps that need the CPU." Well, it's not that you use them. It's that the ones you have used are likely still running. For example, even though I always use the 'Exit' menu item in Slacker Radio, it will always show up as a running process in Task Manager.

In the Developer Options, there are a few useful ways to fix this problem.

First, check the box next to 'Don't keep activities'. This will cause whatever app you are using to stop completely as soon as it is not on the screen anymore. This is useful if you have the habit of using the 'Home' button when you are done with apps.

Next, set the 'Background process limit' to something other than the standard limit. I have mine set to 4 processes. This will keep processes that are not tied to any specific app in check.

If you use a lot of apps and games that have to render video, it might be a good idea to check the 'Force GPU rendering' box. This will force apps such as games to use the slightly less powerful GPU in the Nitro for video. Thus letting your CPU relax a bit. I have also noticed that heat doesn't build up as much with this box checked.

Lastly, if you want to know about more of the processes that hang in the background that may cause performance issues, you can check the 'Show all ANRs' box. Personally, I found it annoying.

Power Saver

Settings > Power Saver

I was really excited for this feature but also very skeptical. But, I gave it a try anyway. What this feature does is when your battery level gets to a certain percent that you choose, it will turn off power consuming features and change some settings to use less power. I have mine set to engage at 20% battery life.

The tips I have seen say to check every box. But, because of my profession, I have to have 'Auto-sync' left on for emails and such.

With the settings below, I usually see the last 20% of battery last about 4 to 5 hours of medium use.

CPU Clock

*Requires Root*

Unlike all the tips above, this one will require you to root your Nitro.

As I said before, the 1.5GHz CPU uses a ton of power. When you think about it, unless you are playing games all the time or doing some kind of complex calculation as part of your Quantum Physics experiment on you phone, you really don't need all that power. So, what I did was underclocked the CPU to 1GHZ. This gives me the power I need to do what I do but with more efficient energy consumption.

I used SetCPU for this but there are a few other choices out there that do the job just as good.

As you can see from the screenshot below, I have set the max frequency to 1026MHz and the min frequency to 384MHz (I have since set min to 192MHz). I set the governor to 'conservative' based on this post: LINK. But, I think that any of them will help in different ways.

If you are curious, I'm also inserting a screenshot of my benchmarks after the underclock.

CPU Sleep

(Suggested by rani9990)

*Requires Root*

XDA user rani9990 suggested an app called CPU Sleeper that, essentially, puts additional cores into an offline mode while the screen is off.

I can see how this would be advantageous because when your phone is in sleep mode, it really doesn't need all that extra power.

I have had it on my phone since i got up this morning and have noticed a significant jump in battery life already.

Results

Before these tips, I was getting about 8 to 9 hours of medium use on a charge.

After, I get roughly 15 to 20 hours of medium use. (It varies from day to day but hovers between 15 and 20.)

If anybody has any other tips, please let me know so I can add them to the list.