It's safe to say that there's no downside to improving your phone's battery life, so any app that can help you achieve just that is already off to a good start. But does Battery Extender Lite 1.16 deliver on its promise? We've been testing it out on our Nokia X7 to find out. 

The Nokia X7 offers decent battery life considering that 4-inch screen it has to power, but regardless of your existing battery use figures, there's nothing wrong with being able to get more life out of your power cell between charges.

Check out our Nokia X7 review roundup

And that's what Battery Extender Lite 1.16 professes to offer. It does this mainly through offering you a series of power profiles, allowing you to choose settings based on how you're going to be using your phone, so your Nokia can direct resources where they're needed and cut them back elsewhere.

When you start the app up, you're taken straight to a page where all the available power profiles are listed. The first time you fire it up you're given an explanation of what each setting actually entails in a slightly-too-small text window that involves a lot of scrolling. Fortunately, you can read it again, and far more comfortably, by tapping Options, then Help.

So what are the settings you're given to choose from? In part they're based on your existing profiles, including the likes of Cinema (which is based on Silent), Meeting (speaks for itself) and Outdoor Sports+ (based on Outdoor).

This is a sensible approach, as regardless of what your specific battery use needs are, if you're in the cinema your primary requirement is for your phone not be silent, so it makes sense to preserve that option.

The three profiles that are specific to Battery Extender Lite are Maximum Battery, Outdoor sports, and Improved Battery.

Maximum battery does what it says on the tin – optimises your settings so your battery lasts as long as possible, while Outdoor Sports is identical but leaves your GPS switched on.

Interestingly, the settings in each profile vary depending on how much battery life you have left, which is fair enough as more often than not you only really need to go easy on your battery when it's running out.

The Improved Battery setting is the same as Maximum Battery, but will keep your phone operating as normal for longer before it starts looking for ways to save juice.

To really get to grips with the program, however, tap Options on any of the profiles, and then Customise. Here you get to the mechanics of how Battery Extender actually works. You can tinker with specifics such as how bright the backlight is, and whether Bluetooth is available or not, and have different settings for how many bars of battery you have left. So if you're on full power, for instance, Bluetooth and GPS are on, but if you get to three bars or lower, they're automatically disabled.

It involves more effort than you ever thought you'd devote to such considerations, but it's worth doing even if it's just to get a better sense of what functions on your phone are responsible for draining the battery. And fortunately, there's always the default setting that will return your phone to the state it was in when the app was first installed.

These advanced features are part of the Battery Extender Pro package, which you only get to try out for 14 days. But if you are taken by it, you'll find the upgrade worth it, and otherwise you've still got the preset profiles on hand to help squeeze more life out of your battery.

DOWNLOAD: Battery Extender Lite 1.16
Size: 0.30MB
Price: Free