Everyone of us has been in this situation before. The LED on your BlackBerry starts to blink yellow, indicating that your BlackBerry is running out of battery and while you are frantically looking around to find the nearest power plug you have to realize that there is nothing you can do and that your BlackBerry will turn itself off sooner or later.

While there is not a lot you can do right away in such a situation you can prevent these situations by following five habits that will help you to save energy and increase the battery life of your BlackBerry smartphone.

Activate Auto On/Off

One of the biggest energy savers on you BlackBerry smartphone is the Auto On/Off feature. You can activate Auto On/Off and your BlackBerry will turn off and on and defined times. Since you are probably not using your BlackBerry while you are sleeping you can safely turn it off at a time when you are certainly asleep and let it turn on just a few minutes before you have set your alarm.

In case you are using you BlackBerry also as an alarm clock you don’t have to worry that your alarm won’t ring. Your BlackBerry will ring any time you have set an alarm ignoring any Auto On/Off or Standy mode.

You can set the Auto On/Off Feature by Options > Auto On/Off.

Deactive unused Blackberry connections

Your BlackBerry smartphone offers a wide range of different wireless connectivity options like celluar radio, BlueTooth and on some models also Wi-Fi. While they are good to have when you need them, there is absolutely no need to have them turned on when you are not using them. Because even if you don’t use them, as long as they are turned on they will use up energy and drain your battery faster.

In order to turn off connections that you don’t need open the “Manage Connections” menu. There you can turn off individual connections or deactivate all connections by selecting “Turn All Connections Off”. When you turn off all connections you also won’t be able to make any phone calls and nobody can reach you, so chose this option only when you are really sure about it.

One situation when you should turn off all connections is when you are in areas where you have absolutely no cellular reception or when you are riding the subway and know that you won’t have reception. Because if your mobile phone doesn’t have any reception it will start to actively look for an available network and this will drain your battery’s energy as well.

Optimize your Screen Backlight

The screen backlight is one of the other big users of energy on your BlackBerry. The standard settings are pretty good for most user but if you really want to extend battery life, these settings can really give a boost to your energy savings steps.

There are basically two settings you can change with regard to screen backlight. The first setting is backlight brightness which uses more energy the brighter you screen. The second setting you can change is the backlight duration which uses more energy the longer your screen is lit.

To change backlight settings click on the Options and select the Screen/Keyboard option and set your Backlight Brightness to the lowest level you can stand without needing to struggle to see your display. Then set your Backlight Timeout–how long your screen will stay on before going black–to the shortest time period you can handle.

Limit use of “always-on” BlackBerry applications

The more BlackBerry applications you have running on your BlackBerry at the same time, the more energy they will consume and therefore shorten your Battery Life. Especially applications that are meant to run in the background (Facebook Clients, Twitter Applications, Viigo Reader, Instant Messaging Applications) will significantly use energy even when you are not actively using them.

The best tip to prevent applications from draining your battery is to turn them off whenever you don’t need them. Turning them of usually requires to really shut down the application and not just to hide the application. This will not just help you safe energy but will also make your BlackBerry respond faster because applications that are properly closed don’t use up memory.

These tactics should help you decrease the power usage of your BlackBerry and extend battery life so that you don’t have to be worried about missing phone calls because your phone ran out of battery.

Any tips missing? What are your personal tactics to save energy on your BlackBerry? Share them in the comments!