Smartphone Battery Saving tips

Smart phones are becoming more and more powerful day by day. With Samsung Galaxy S3, quad-core processors also have become a reality in mobile world. Now dual core processors are quite common in smart phone industry. As the processing power is increasing, batteries of better capacity is also coming, but still any smart phone is not able to give battery life more than one day.
The only restriction in   industry is the lack of an excellent power source that can power the gadgets for longer time. Even though researches are going on the field, considerable success is still a distant dream. Most of the smart phone batteries are using Li-Ion technology. In present day smart phones, you can use some battery saving tips to get good battery life. See the list of tips and explanations below.

1. For first two charging, charge for a minimum of 6 hours.

  When you are charging your battery for the first time, charge it for minimum of 6 hours. You can do it for the second time also. When you are doing this you may feel battery is getting hotter, but it is okay for the first two times. But never ever charge battery for longer time, if it has reached 100% from the third charging onwards. Overcharging the battery will heat it up.


2. Overcharging and Draining charge fully.

Charging the battery even after it has reached 100%, will overheat the battery, and will affect the Li-Ion layers. In future it will cause reduction in battery life. So never overcharge the battery. For this you can use some apps to give you an alarm when the battery reaches 100%.
Also draining the battery fully to 0%, so that it will get switched off, is also not good. Draining the charge fully will stress the polymer layers and decrease battery life.
So Recharge when your battery reaches to a low-level of 5% at least.

3. Take the most out of every charging.

For Li-Ion battery there will be a limited number of charging cycles, independent of how you are using your battery. So if you are charging your battery only to 80%, you are losing 20% of one charging cycle. So charge your battery to full charge, and never overcharge (use apps). Also to get the most out of one charging, put it for charging, only after draining battery to a very low-level (never let it to get switched off). Like this you can use the most out of charging cycles. As the charging cycles are limited for any particular battery, you can get most life for your battery only by getting the maximum out of each charging. Overall this point we can explain with an example. Suppose, you have a phone battery which has 400 charging cycles. ie battery will deteriorate after this 400 charging cycles. If you are charging your battery once in two days you can use it for 800 days. But if you are charging the battery everyday, before the charge is fully draining out, you can use it for only 400 days. For Li-ion battery this example of limited number of charging cycles is true.

4. Make better use of power saving mode.

In most of the smart phones you can see, power saving mode option. It will decrease power consumption. You can activate this mode when the phone is idle. During power saving mode brightness of display and processor clocking speed will decrease, consuming less power only. Also you can set auto activate of power saving mode when battery level reaches below a particular level like 50%. This mode will be very useful in phones with multi-core processor. When the phone is idle, if some cores can be given rest using power saving mode, battery consumption will be considerably less.

5. Make use of battery saving applications

For all smart phone platforms there are lots of battery saving apps. For android platform there are many like Battery doctor, Battery Notifier, Battery level widget etc. All these apps will give tips and functionality to save your battery charge. These apps can be used to keep an eye on battery level, kill unnecessary apps, give alarm sound when charging is complete etc.

6. Find what is draining your battery most, and avoid it.

Some apps are there in all smartphone platforms draining more battery charge, that a normal app does. This can be due to malicious apps or faulty code in apps. If you are feeling that after installing or while using some app, battery is draining very fast, uninstall it.  You can monitor which part of your phone is using battery most. For Android this option will be in settings as shown below

Read about more tips to extend the battery life of your android smartphone

Waiting list confirmation chances - Indian Railway

There is a large number of waiting lists associated with Indian Railway ticket booking system. Read more about the types of waiting lists and chance of confirmation of these waiting lists.

Majority of the people in India is depending on trains for internal long distance journey. So booking tickets for trains is common in every Indian's day to day life. But the confusing part about Indian railways is its ticket booking system. There are many different types of trains with different types of coaches, each with various pricing scheme. In these trains itself there are various kinds of quotas and special reservations. So the entire seat allocation of Indian railways is little bit confusing.

Seat allocation while booking train ticket

       When you are booking a ticket in Indian railways, your ticket can come in any of the many categories like confirmed, RAC, WL, CKWL etc. How these statuses are coming and what are the meaning of these is the topic of discussion here.

Confirmed tickets

       Once the booking for a train has started, first booking will start for all seats. The status of these ticket will be confirmed.

RAC tickets (Reservation against Cancellation)

 Once all seats are over, still booking will continue, but this time the status of the tickets will be RAC(Reservation against cancellation) . All those people who are holding RAC ticket can travel in the train. But they may have to share the seat with one more fellow. Because in RAC, same seat will be allotted for two people. As these are sleeper seats, there will be enough seat for two persons to sit. Usually most of the RAC ticket will become confirmed, once the journey is started, because ticket examiner is supposed to give the confirmed seats of persons who are not traveling to RAC holders. RAC booking will continue to some additional 90 seats. Usually these seats will be side seats (side upper or side lower).

Waiting lists.

Even if the additional 90 seats of RAC also over, ticket booking process will not stop. Booking will continue as waiting listed tickets. For the waiting list tickets the limit is nearly 300. After that booking will stop for the train. Out of these waiting lists there is  a large number of  confusing varieties. Different types of waiting list are,

WL

This is the normal waiting list. If it is shown like WL30, that means there are 29 waiting people before you to get at least an RAC ticket. Sometimes it will show like WL84/WL50, this means when booked the status was 84, but now you are at 50th position. ie only 49 more people waiting in front of you. Rarely this waiting list will be mentioned as GNWL also, which is general waiting list.

CKWL

These are waiting lists for tatkal tickets. If you are trying to book train ticket through tatkal one day before the day of journey, there will be only CKWL after confirmed ticket. No RAC will be there. CKWL will get confirmed only if somebody with confirmed tatkal ticket cancels their ticket, probability of which is very less. So confirmation chance for CKWL is less. Also it will not move to RAC, it will directly become confirmed if you advance from CKWL. As there are some additional quota tickets, you will get confirmed tatkal ticket while preparing chart even if you are in CKWL. Upto CKWL 15 will get confirmed like this.

PQWL

These are Pooled quota waiting list. Region wise some trains will be sharing some pooled quota. Usually these, quota is possessed by small stations in the middle of the travel route of main trains. As they will not come in the main quota of starting point people, this quota is necessary for giving some waiting list preference to the people from the middle small stations. In short these seats are aimed at travelers boarding or unboarding from intermediate stations. Confirmation chance for these seats is also less as it is a very small quota.

RLWL   

This is called Remote Location waiting list. RLWL is aimed for the travelers from non starting main stops like main cities or metros to small stops before terminating stop. Unless these people are included with separate quota, a large number of people boarding from intermediate cities will not be considered equally. Waiting list confirmation chance for these waiting lists depends on the cancellation of tickets booked in these quota.

In addition to these there are some other quotas created to help travelers from all categories. It includes RQWL, Ladies quota, Foreign tourist quota, Emergency quota, against all of these there will be waiting lists also.

If you want to read more about waiting lists read on,

IRCTC waiting lists and chances of ticket confirmation