The Nokia 5230 is the smartphone for social butterflies. Customise its homescreen and it delivers instant access to social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Visit the Nokia Ovi Store and its talents multiply with apps. This can affect battery life, however. Read on to find out how to improve the battery life on your Nokia 5230…

The battery life on your Nokia 5230 always takes a battering when you’re running more features, so the easiest thing you can do is to make sure you exit all of the applications you’re not using, and to turn off Bluetooth when it's not in use. Bluetooth can be particularly power intensive, so this should make a big difference to battery life.

The next step is to turn down the screen brightness on your Nokia 5230, as aside from Bluetooth, the display is the largest draw on power. From the menu, click Settings, Phone and Display to bring up the relevant settings.

Making sure the back light goes off sooner rather than later is a good way of saving power without affecting usability, so change the Light Time Out to 10 or 15 seconds. Dimming the display will also make a big difference to power consumption.

Features such as the widgets on the home page of the Nokia 5230 can also use up a lot of power. If you have the AccuWeather application running, for instance, or the Facebook application, then both of these require a power-sapping connection to the internet. Click on options, and Content to Offline Mode to save power. It’s easy to turn the content back to online mode again, giving the best of both worlds.

Finally, if you use your Nokia 5230 for talking rather than hitting the web, you can also change the connection settings. While a UMTS connection offers a much faster connection to the internet, it also draws more power than the older GSM technology. From the menu, click Settings, Connectivity and Network. Change the network mode from Dual to GSM. You can change this back again if quicker speeds are required when browsing the net.