Ways for students to improve smartphone and tablet battery life

Running from class to class, staying on board with emails and your social media accounts, using schedule and note-taking applications -- sometimes, your smartphone or tablet won't keep up.

Now school is back in session, some students will be getting to grips with their latest shiny toys -- but might not know how to get the most battery life out of them. Jeffrey Becker, Director of Marketing of DU Battery Saver, has come up with a number of tips for students who want their smartphone or tablet to last just that little bit longer, but won't cost students anything extra to implement.

Insufficient battery life often remains an issue, and apart from buying portable power packs for emergency charging, there are a number of ways a student can improve longevity for their gadgets.

See also: 20 essential iPhone, iPad apps for college students

1. Focus on the app at hand: If you have e-books for your classes or use your device to take notes, make sure that there are no unnecessary apps running in the background. Not only can they be a distraction -- (I'll just check Facebook quickly..) -- they can also significantly drain your battery over time.

2. Bright isn't always smart: A device's display can eat up over 60 percent of its battery life over the course of a day. To combat this, keep smartphone and tablet screens slightly dimmed when you're using them. You're likely to adapt to or not even notice small changes, but it can result in hours added to battery life.

3. Connections for life: Classmates are often friends for life. But when it comes to battery life, network services can be your enemy. If you don't use Wi-Fi networks, be sure to turn off the Wi-Fi setting, to stop it continually scanning for nearby, available networks. On the other hand, if school Wi-Fi is available, turning off cellular data (3G, 4G or LTE) can help matters.

4. Take the time to unplug: Having your device always connected to a charger can actually damage its batteries, making them less able, over time, to hold a charge. For optimum battery health, charge your battery in the evening until it's at 95 to 100 percent. Allow it to remain unplugged overnight, then top off the charge in the morning before school.

5. Install a trusted battery saving app: If manual changes are too much of a hassle, a number of battery saving applications on the market can do it for you. On Android, Juice Defender, DU Battery Saver and Easy Battery Saver are worth exploring, while on iOS, Battery Saver, Battery Doctor and Battery Life Pro are popular ways to save extra juice.

A number of additional ways to save your battery include:

Turn off BlueToothTurn off location-based servicesioS: Turn data push offChange your settings to collect new email less oftenand remember to keep your phone cool, as temperature changes impact on battery performance.

Microsoft: Office 365 at $1.5 billion annual run rate

Summary: Office 365 deployed seats are expanding and leading Microsoft's transition from a business model based on licensing to subscriptions.

Microsoft on Thursday made the case that it could navigate the transition from software licensing to cloud-based services and its primary example was Office 365.

The Evolution of Enterprise Software: An overview

Enterprise software is evolving under selection pressure from challenging economic conditions and the adaptive possibilities afforded by cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics and social engagement.

Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft, said that Office 365 is at a $1.5 billion annual run rate. In April, Microsoft said Office 365 was poised to hit a $1 billion annual run rate.

Turner said:

This past year we grew Office 365 deployed seats over 350 percent in FY13 alone. It's still accelerating. We're only at the tip of the iceberg of this particular opportunity.

Office 365 is being closely watched by Wall Street. Some analysts have argued that Microsoft should ramp Office 365 as well as unleash Office completely on platforms such as Android and Apple's iOS. The argument for this Office unleashed case is that Microsoft can offset declining Windows revenue in the future. For now, Office is positioned to mostly protect Windows, according to some analysts.

Like other software companies, Microsoft is trying to handle the revenue curves as it transitions from a licensing model to one based on continual revenue and subscriptions. Adobe has handled the transition well and other enterprise software players such as Oracle and SAP are have acquired their way to cloud computing.

Microsoft also appears to have made the transition well, but there's more work to do. Turner's big argument was that the cloud doesn't mean less revenue growth.

He took four accounts and outlined the revenue changes with cloud computing over a licensing model. He said:

You see Microsoft has never been considered a mission critical IT service provider in the enterprise. Today we are. That's the new Microsoft. The new Microsoft says we're getting a much richer and deeper share of wallet from those customers who go to the cloud with us. And we see this over and over again. We have a great opportunity to be able to leverage that.

In other words, Office 365 is the most visible cloud effort, but it's part of the larger product pie that includes everything from Azure to Dynamics. What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can grab enough cloud wallet share to offset the revenue hit from transitioning away from a licensing model.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

RMS demonstrates the importance of the private cloud

When RMS looked to deploy edge RMSone betas of your risk management solution, customers realized that the cloud-based service would be significantly less valuable if it was not very reliable.

With customers around the world, 24 hour uptime should be normal, not a choice. And as specialists in risk management, RMS knew exactly how to assess risks in the use of the public cloud. So it was with surprise that they invited some other journalists to Iceland and I this week to reveal their new private cloud, cloud of RM, which feeds its catastrophic risks RMSone assessment tools and move towards the general release from next April.

Located in the Centre of Verne Global data at the site of the former the Naval NATO Air Station Keflavik, just west of Reykjavik, Iceland, RMS and your provider Datapipe technology are able to take full advantage of 100% green energy infrastructure of Iceland along with free air cooling and the latest in modern datacenter design. (Tuned for the next article drilled by the World Fund of Verne).

With high-performance Cisco UCS servers and storage EMC Symmetrix VMAX cloud feeding the cloud RM, backed by the Green cloud Datapipe platform stratosphere peak workloads, RMS HPC feels have the database they need to offer their services complex, but critical to its clients from the insurance company. Most importantly, have a cloud service you can trust; a critical feature is the most popular services on the public cloud.

Speaking to Paris Georgallis, VP of operations at the platform of RMS and a man responsible for the side of the House technology, you have the definite impression that would have liked to have been able to not make the important investment in backend represented by its presence in the Icelandic datacenter cloud technology. But the reality of the situation with Amazon EC2, where he had done some of their early development and testing made it clear that it was not a suitable solution for your line of business, mission-critical appeal.

He said that still make use of the Amazon Cloud for some development efforts and non-critical tasks of CPU, but that he felt that, for now, the future of the cloud of criticism for the business would be the model private cloud, not the public.

Juniper throws its hat into the open-source SDN ring

Summary: Juniper announced the commercial availability of its Juniper Contrail SDN and its open- source counterpart. Project Daylight, it's open-source SDN rival, would love to integrate it.

Software Defined Network (SDN) will revolutionize datacenter and cloud networking — if everyone can agree on how to deploy it. Alcatel-Lucent has Nuage; Cisco and a host of other companies have the open-source Project Daylight, amd now Juniper has its own take: Contrail and its open-source brother OpenContrail.

Contrail, and its open-source counterpart consist of two main components: the Contrail Controller and the Contrail vRouter.

The Contrail Controller is a logically centralized but physically distributed SDN controller that's in charge of managing, controlling, and running analytics on the virtualized network. This exposes a set of Representational State Transfer (RESTful) application programming interfaces (APIs) to cloud orchestration tools, such as Juju, Chef, and Puppet,  and other applications. At present, the Contrail controller works with OpenStack, CloudStack, and IBM's SmartCloud Orchestrator.

The Contrail vRouter is a forwarding plane of a distributed router that runs in the Xen or KVM hypervisor of a virtualized Linux server. It extends the network from the physical routers and switches in a datacenter into a virtual overlay network hosted in the virtualized servers. The controller talks with other vRouters by using Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). They then build tunnels between virtual machine, which run over the physical network.

Like all SDNs, Contrail's master goal is to free networking from the constraints of hardware by virtualization Unlike other such SDNs, Contrail doesn't use OpenFlow as one of its foundation technologies. Bob Muglia, the former Microsoft executive and Juniper's executive VP of software explained to The Register, "If there are usages cases for OpenFlow that are interesting — we can add OpenFlow to it."

The fundamental problem with Contrail, and all the others, is that there are getting to be too many of them. Open-source or not when you have too many standards it makes it harder for administrators to unify their services.

David Myers, Brocade's Service Provider CTO and chair of the OpenDaylight Project Technical Steering Committee, has a solution in mind. Myers said at LinuxCon in New Orleans that "OpenContrail architecture is pretty elegant, OpenDaylight has worked a lot with Juniper, but they haven't come to work with us. Sill, we would like them to bring Contrail into OpenDaylight."

Sure, Myers continued, "Both could co-exist, but if we have a lot of different systems managing different stacks and they don't have ways to communicate with each other, it could get messy.  We want to solve this problem." In conclusion, "It would be great to bring these projects together."

Given that Cisco is one of DayLight's biggest members and Juniper sees Cisco as its biggest rival, and vice-versa, this might not be easy. On the other hand, were they to do so it might be better for their datacenters and cloud company customers.  

Related Stories:

Topics: Networking, Cloud, Data Centers, Enterprise Software, Open Source, Software Development, Virtualization

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge PC operating system. SJVN covers networking, Linux, open source, and operating systems.

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Microsoft rolls out IE11 for Windows 7 consumer preview

Errors, curiosities and Apple iOS 7 defects

Summary: The long-awaited update iOS 7 has now been released to the public, but what flaws, security holes, and rare design elements remain fixed?

System update Apple iOS 7 operation, was released to the public this week.

iOS 7 is considered an update that is robust with a number of positive points, including edge-to-edge design, automatic updating of applications, improved mail, better security and the inclusion of release for iOS.

The new update also corrects 80 security vulnerabilities that allegedly remain on iOS 6, including the prevention of execution of malicious code, determination of passwords through applications and the ability to intercept data protected with hybrid IPSec auth.

However, has reported a series of faults and problems, including behind the response times, the confusion of app with control gestures, inconsistent design and garish colors.

While we have to take into account that always will result the release of a new operating system on the surface of errors and defects, are problems found and hope that it will soon set after downloading the latest update?

Topics: Apple, iOS, iPhone, mobile OS, mobility

London medical anthropologist Charlie Osborne is journalist, graphic designer, and former teacher.

Start your day with a daily newsletter of ZDNet. It is the freshest technology news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

In this presentation, discover the new frontier of application security and learn how the latest version of IBM AppScan can help security.

In this white paper, see why most companies choose their data migration, and how the combination of best practices and migration tools can smooth the process.

The trend of IBM X-Force and risk report provides statistical information about all aspects of the threats affecting the security of the Internet. It is intended to help customers, researchers and the public to understand the changing nature of the landscape threat. Download it now.

10 disadvantages Windows 8 tablets have compared to the iPad and Android