Image by Nathan W. Pyle.

One of the primary, and easiest to apply tricks, is to toggle off the highest power consuming elements of your device. Chris writes:

For those curious why Chris waits until his battery is low to charge it: batteries have a finite number of charge cycles before the performance begins to degrade. Older Ni-Cad batteries had issues with battery memory but still had a recharge based life cycle (that said, some readers still found Ni-Cad batteries to be an ideal solution for their needs). Newer Lithium Ion batteries no longer suffer from the battery memory issues but they to have a fixed life cycle. While it takes quite a few charge cycles for performance to noticeably degrade and quite a few more for the battery to actually need a replacement, if you’re trying to really extend the life of your battery its worth paying attention to.

John Weiss uses quick toggles to turn off the high-power items on his phone:

Most of these options are buried within system menus so it’s worth searching the App Store/Marketplace for quick access widgets. Most of the time we need cellular access but not Wi-Fi and GPS—turning just those two off can significantly extend battery life.

Michael skips the whole toggle on/off routine and upgrades:

That’s a decent solution, although most of our newer electronics have pretty good batteries, historically we’ve gone the upgrade route. It doesn’t make sense to use a 1200 mAh battery in your cellphone if you can get a cheap 2000mAh battery that fits in the same space.

Xaviant goes a step further than simply toggling and uses Tasker to manage his connectivity:

For my phone (Android), I use Tasker to turn off things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth after about 10 minutes of no connectivity, and also to turn off when I go to sleep. I keep GPS off most of the time because I never really use it, And I usually get about 18 hours out of it before I ever need a charge. On top of that I also bought a universal backup battery from Duracell, just in case I ever kill it playing a game or something.

My iPod Touch is usually set to airplane mode when it’s off the dock. Just listening to music, it lasts me about 3 days before it ever needs a charge.