If you own an Android phone, undoubtedly at some point you’ve looked at your phone’s battery meter after a lengthy stretch of time when it just sat in your pocket, only to be shocked at how much has power has been consumed. Then you’re stuck with a nearly dead phone and all sorts of thoughts of, “where did all that power go?”

A recent study might have found the root of that problem though, and the folks over at Mashable.com offer up a little bit of insight as to what could potentially be done to help extend your Android phone’s battery life.

Below is an excerpt from the Mashable article describing both findings of the study and info on other battery drains. Check it out…
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Sick of watching your battery icon seemingly go as fast as a stoplight from green to yellow to red? It could well be all the apps you have installed — even the ones you aren’t using.

A team of researchers at Purdue University released a study to TechNewsDaily that thoroughly examines what dozens of popular apps are doing on Android phones, and what many of them are doing wrong. (Though the study was only on Google’s Android operating system, the researchers say that they can do the same for Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows phone operating systems.)

Apps turn on parts of the phone, such as the processor, the GPS or the camera, when they need them, which is normal. But by digging into the code of apps, the researchers often found what they call “no-sleep energy bugs,” mistakes in the program that fail to turn the components off when they are done. Unlike computers, which are often plugged in and “awake” most of the time, smartphones try whenever possible to be in a “sleep” mode to save precious battery life. But buggy apps defeat the purpose.

The apps you download aren’t the only culprits — many that are part of the Android operating system are overtaxing the hardware. Culprits include the native email program, Google Maps, the Android backup service and, ironically, the power manager that is meant to conserve battery life. The preinstalled Facebook app also overuses the phone’s battery. Most of these problem apps, the Purdue researchers say, were previously unknown.
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To check out the rest of this article, head over to Mashable.com to finish it off: http://mashable.com/2012/06/15/why-phone-battery-drains/