Battery life is probably the most important spec on your phone. It’s all well and good to have high-powered features, but they’re worthless if you don’t have the power to use them. So anything that can improve or extend battery life are more than welcome.
The Google Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G both come with Battery Saver Mode, which Google promises can offer up to 48 hours of battery life, which is mighty impressive. But Google isn’t leaving it there, because this feature is also coming to older Pixel phones.
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The Pixel range’s regular battery saver is designed to limit what apps and features are active on your phone, because the ones running in the background can easily drain power without you realizing it. Extreme Battery Saver, as the name suggests, takes that to a new extreme. On top of standard Battery Saver functions, it also pauses most non-essential apps, turns off unnecessary features, and slows the phone’s processes down.
This is presumably why Google is bringing Extreme Battery Saver to older devices as part of a future feature drop. When you need to extend the battery life as long as possible, you need all the help you can get.
Unfortunately, we don’t know anything else beyond the fact it’s happening “very soon." Google also hasn’t given us any indication as to which Pixel devices are set to get the new battery-extending features.
The Pixel 4, with its notoriously short battery life, is practically guaranteed to be included, as are the 4G Pixel 4a and Pixel 3a on account of their young age. Things get a little dicey the further back we go, and it’s not clear whether older devices will continue to be supported.
It seems likely that the Pixel 3 will be the oldest Google phone to get Extreme Battery Saver, since Google ended support for the original Pixel at the end of last year and promised Pixel 2 support would end after the release of Android 11. That came out last month.
Still, if you’re rocking a relatively recent Pixel device, you have something to look forward to. Especially if you’ve been suffering through the Pixel 4’s terrible battery performance for the past year.
