What’s the biggest bugbear about running a smartphone again? Yep, that battery life stuff. It seems that most of the time we’re making huge compromises just to eke out an extra hour here and there, to keep the phone working. It’s annoying is what. But now there’s a new tool to help in the fight.

The free DU Battery Saver app is actually not that new, but they do keep improving it regularly. The idea is it automates all those little tasks you can do to extend the running time and battery condition of your Android phone or tablet computer. There’s nothing mystical or magical about what it does, but it just does it more regularly and with less button pushes needed.

In fact all you have to do is press the Optimize button and it will kill all background apps (including ones which could be using up your battery time) and give you a reading. You can set up different types of running modes too, which is pretty cool, which means you can set your phone to run in optimum battery life mode (dim screen, all the network radios off etc) for when you need to really eke out the battery in an emergency.

As we said nothing revolutionary, but it’s a nice app nonetheless, and definitely worth an install. It’s a bit annoying that you can’t remove the notification bar icons, but it’s a small niggle. Oh and it has a set of tools to help with doing the optimum charge routine to help increase your battery life as well as running time. Nice.