WP8: low on battery? go “ease of access”

Windows Phone comes with a “battery saver” feature that can be a life saver when you are running low on battery. This feature turns off some services while on standby and preserve battery life. When this service is on you can still receive calls and text, but apps run only when you open them and email must be synced manually.

Another way I have found to significantly extend my battery life is Ease of Access . This “side effect” IS NOT reflected in the Estimated Time Remaining which is updated when you turn batter saver on. The key to this is AMOLED.

Ease of Access allows you to turn high contrast on. This feature changes the colors for some features, and hides some of their background images. A lot of mobile phones today use AMOLED displays, which according to Wikipedia its power consumption is based on color displayed.

“The amount of power the display consumes varies significantly depending on the colour and brightness shown. As an example, one commercial QVGA OLED display consumes 0.3 watts while showing white text on a black background, but more than 0.7 watts showing black text on a white background, while an LCD may consume only a constant 0.35 watts regardless of what is being shown on screen.[10] Because the black pixels actually turn off, AMOLED also has contrast ratios that are significantly better than LCD.”

Ease of Access turns off a large percentage of the screen to black (including no lock screen image) and in the process extending battery life significantly (this assertion is based on experience no empirical measurements). In fact, I use it permanently now not only for the benefit of battery life but it makes my phone look more eccentric.

Here is what the start page looks like under both settings.

Ease of Access on

Only apps using system colors are affected when the setting is turn on.

Steps to turning Ease of Access:

Select Settings, then scroll down and select Ease of Access, turn High contrast ON. – done!