I’ve received a few questions regarding the battery life on a Fire tablet; here’s an abridged version of one I periodically receive:
I’m wondering if you are having a problem with the Fire battery life, or if you’ve heard of it being a problem? The other night I was reading on a fully charged Fire. Wifi was off. I read for about 30 minutes and it went from 100% to 93%. That seems like a big drop considering I could go weeks on my Kindle without recharging. This was simple book reading, no games or other activity. I definitely find I have to charge my Fire far more often than my Kindle.
Because of the color screen, you will have the battery run down a lot faster than on an e-Ink Kindle.
One thing you might look at is the number of applications (apps) that are running before you contact Amazon’s customer service department: for each app that is running, in addition to decreasing your Fire’s memory and dragging down the speed, if you have numerous apps running the battery will really start to drain (that’s true for a laptop computer running on the battery, smartphone, etc.). To turn off apps that are running you are not using, while there are 101 ways to do it here is how I do it on my Fire tablet:
• Open the menu bar by tapping the square icon from the home screen, which is the bottom right-hand icon just right of the center; it will be the third one on that bottom list of icons.
• You will then see a list of apps that are currently running or “on” right now: they will pop up within their own mini window. You may (or may not) be surprised at what is running.
• To turn a particular app off, I tap the “X” of each of these mini windows.
I just did that for mine, and I was very surprised to see I had 16 open apps – search screens, email, games, weather, you name it! I turned each of them off.
One other thing you may want to try is turn off your Wi-Fi: having the Wi-Fi on continuously drains the battery, especially if you lose your connection and the Fire is constantly searching for a new network to join.
Hope that helps!
Michael
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