The only time we hate our smartphones the most is when the battery gives up in the hour of need. And, for some mysterious reason, this happens almost always.

Smartphones are amazing, loaded with the myriad of features, and merely one major flaw: they don’t last very long. In spite of the importance of battery life, manufacturers are still focusing mainly on screen resolution and processors. So, we do have cutting-edge mobile phones, but these only last for about a day or even less.

Google Play has many decent apps that can prolong your battery life of your Android phone, but that’s not the only way out. By changing some simple phone settings, you can get more juice out of your battery. Following are some basic tips that you can start with:

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

More often than not, we miss out on the obvious. Turning down display brightness and turning off your Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi and Auto-sync are some of the pretty obvious solutions for saving battery. Turn off these functions when you aren’t using them or don’t need them.

DISABLE 4G LTE

LTE allows you to access mobile web at a higher speed, however, it also consumes comparatively more energy. If your phone, allows you to disable 4G, when you don’t have a decent 4G network coverage or you don’t need it necessarily, you could get more out of your battery.

USE KITKAT’s NEW GPS FEATURE

The new feature of Android 4.4 “KitKat”, Battery Saving GPS mode, makes use of only your Wi-Fi and mobile networks to find your location. Sure, it will have less accuracy, but it will be more than enough for apps that ask for your current location, such as Foursquare. To change the location mode, go to Settings > Location > Mode.

TURN OFF GOOGLE NOW VOICE COMMANDS

The new voice commands in KitKat is both useful and fun. Unless you really have to use it a lot, you can turn off this feature as it uses quite some energy. Head to Google Now > Settings > Voice and disable Hotword detection.

DON’T SYNC EVERYTHING

Turning on auto-sync for all Google services across all your devices is extremely convenient. But, do you need all of these services? Instead of keeping the default option of syncing all the services on, take a look at the settings and disable the auto-sync for unnecessary services. To do this, go to Settings > Select your Google account under ‘Accounts’ > Select your email address > Uncheck the services you don’t need.

FIND OTHER BATTERY KILLERS USING GOOGLE’s BATTERY MONITOR

This built-in battery monitoring tool shows you which apps and services drained your battery the most. Keep checking this tool regularly to ensure that no unwanted apps are running in the background, and exhausting your battery.