Battery drain has plagued many Android devices for years. While it is certainly getting better with each version of the OS, even today tons of users champion devices with removable (and therefore swap out-able) batteries or fast charging technologies that help us get through the day.

It’s possible to monitor your battery usage, optimize your settings and shut down power hungry apps, but for the majority of users, this tweaking and managing is a hassle. Battery Time, from developers Liquidum, hopes to make battery life optimization as easy as pressing one button.

Battery Time Saver & Optimizer — as it is so called in Google Play, where it is available for free — is an incredibly simple utility to use. When you open the app, you are first presented with the battery time remaining on your device. An arrow below this opens up a summary view that shows you approximately how much call time, Wi-Fi use, video, audio and gaming time this will get you.

In the center of the screen lies a large ‘Extend Time’ button. Hit this and the app closes down any power zapping apps, optimizes your display settings, toggles bluetooth and wifi off if you want it to and turns off auto-sync. The beauty of Battery Time is this one-tap functionality that makes it really easy to gain extra minutes of use — and in some cases hours. This makes it really easy for anyone to quickly see how much battery they have left, and squeeze out some extra time.

Below the main Extend Time button lie a number of icons for manually managing the above settings to your liking, and you’ll see the impact on your battery life reflected immediately on the reading at the top of the screen as you make changes.

Should Battery Time’s optimization not be enough for you, you can find further tips in the app’s Message Center. There are some handy tips — especially for the layman — in here that could help to maintain a longer battery life each day.

Key to the usefulness of an app of this kind is how accurate the remaining battery life indicator actually is. If I’m going to rely on the app to let me know roughly how much juice I have left, I need to know it going to be reliably correct. From my testing, I found Battery Time’s readings to be correct within a margin of error of about 30 mins. For a third-party app, I think this is admirable.

Battery Time is certainly focused on the general consumer and would perhaps be lacking feature-wise for the power user. While you can tweak some of the settings manually, overall control is sacrificed for ease of use. The User Interface is straightforward, plain and modern

If you find your battery drains quicker than expected and want a simple way to get more out of your device, Battery Time is worth taking a look at. It’s simplicity makes it easy to download and use immediately, and it can help your device last longer if you allow it to manage your settings for you.

Check out Battery Time on Google Play where it is available to download for free.

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Sony announced its new Xperia X series of devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but today we find out that it is meant to replace the Z line of devices we’ve known for so long. Yes, the Xperia Z series of devices is dead.

Sony Mobile released an official statement on what will happen to the Z series:

The Xperia Z line has reached its culmination – Xperia X series represents a new chapter and evolution of our product strategy. Whilst the Xperia Z series was all about bringing the best of Sony’s advanced technologies to smartphones, Xperia X series is based on bringing smart, adaptive Sony user experiences across camera, battery performance and hardware / software design.Sony

While it’s good to see Sony changing things up (let’s be fair, the Z series has never been that successful) and we hope the company will see new success with the new Xperia X series, it’s a bit sad to see the Z series go. They have historically been solid phones that just didn’t sell that well. What do you think of Sony’s change to a new line of phones?

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