Clean up and optimise Android phones and tablets

Smart phones and tablets never seem to have sufficient storage space, memory or battery life and we are always running short of one thing or another. You have to keep your eye on the usage and optimise the device to get the most out of what you have.

AVG, the company famous for its free anti virus software, has some useful Android apps and one you should take a look at is AVG Battery Saver & TuneUp. It is free in the Google Play Store. Here is it running on my Google Nexus 7:

 

The app has four modules - Task Killer, Battery Consumption, Data Usage and Storage Usage. They are pretty self explanatory and they do what you would expect. Task Killer shows the tasks, which are apps that are running. It shows how much memory each one is using and there is an icon to stop them running to free up memory.

There is also a processes tab and this shows things that are running in the background. A lot of these are simply part of Android , such as the keyboard, Google Account Manager, and so on. They are essential and you can't use the device without them. There are also processes from apps you have added and these are less important. It is possible to stop ones you don't need and so free up memory and processor time.

Battery Consumption shows the battery charge, health and temperature. You can see the time remaining for various activities such as idle, playing video. The device can be manually switched into power saving mode, which turns off all unnecessary components like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and so on and dims the screen. Power saving mode can be triggered automatically when the battery level falls below a set value. Of course, you won't be able to do as much in power saving mode, but at least the device won't completely die on you.

Data Usage shows how much data bandwidth each app has used since the device was last rebooted. This is useful for discovering which apps are using up all the bandwidth you pay for. You could avoid using them if you are near your data limit.

Storage Usage displays the apps you have installed and their sizes, sorted to show the biggest first. If you are running short of memory on your device, you could then uninstall the biggest apps.

This is a simple utility app, but it is free and it has some features most people will find useful. Check out AVG Battery Saver & TuneUp.