#projectvolta

Like its predecessors; Project Butter in Jellybean and Project Svelte in Kitkat, Project Volta is yet another “project” running at the heart of Android Lollipop. Project Volta aims at picking up the issue which plagues all smart-phone users, which is; battery life. Every Android update seems to have its own project aimed at fortifying the update with added stability and enhancements. Android 5.0/ Lollipop, previously code-named ‘Android L,'comes reloaded with Google’s initiative known as Project Volta.  Project Volta primarily aims at improving battery life, and to achieve such a noble task Google certainly has measured up in terms of delivering effectively. Google estimated that for every menial task, waking your phone for one second to see notifications; burns about two minutes of standby time.  Google ventured to the very granular depths to minimize battery wastage.

“Job Scheduler” is a promising feature which stockpiles unnecessary app requests and has an option to perform battery consuming activities while being plugged in.

The two most prominent features that pop out are undoubtedly the “Battery Historian” and the revamped “Battery saver” mode. Project Volta is a concise name given for an array of improvements such as better optimization of battery life, display, power saving mode et all.

Battery Historian displays a very accurate representation of what drains the life out of your battery, it is a revamped/advanced power tracking system which gives you a meticulous representation of all the juice consuming activities through a nifty chart.

Battery saver, as the name suggests, endeavors to save a lot of juice on your phone by taking up relentless “house cleaning” duties. This housekeeping includes shutting down of unnecessary battery draining tasks, minimizing refresh rates, slowing down the CPU, killing off background apps and data. Google estimates that, if used for the entire duration of a day, Battery Saver can effectively extend your battery by 90%; sounds extremely impressive if it is true.

The test run executed by Arstechnica was rigorously thorough. Here’s what they said about the test: -

“We did the test on a single device to remove variances in battery, which meant flashing to 4.4.4, signing in, updating apps, charging up, running the test, and then flashing the same device to the L preview. Our battery test keeps the screen on and automatically loads webpages over Wi-Fi every 15 seconds until the battery dies. For each run, the screen brightness was set to 200 cd/m2, as verified by a colorimeter, and for consistency, we averaged two runs each” Now that’s a pretty relentless test.

The test run(and the image above), courtesy of Arstechnica, puts the Android L through its paces and stands as a testament to all that Google has promised. Stats given above show the battery life is extended by 36% without breaking a sweat. This further affirms Google’s promise of a considerable increase in run time. These tests were run on a Nexus 5. With the update being recently introduced to the world, the stats may vary from phone to phone, but the fact that battery life improves will certainly be undisputed.