Google has transformed Meet into a powerhouse for virtual meetings during the pandemic and is now taking to making the app and service more polished. By adding several new tools and back-end features to help you be more productive, Meet is truly becoming the go-to software for distanced learning in education and enterprise even against stiff competition from Zoom. A new ‘saver mode’ has been added to Meet which means that you’ll no longer be able to skip out of a scheduled meeting due to having a low battery on your device.
The new saver mode decreases the power needed for the central processing unit, or CPU of your phone, conserves battery power, and restricts data. This ensures that your remaining charge lasts longer so that you don’t mysteriously drop out of the call due to your phone dying. It’s well known that video calls take an immense amount of battery and processing power more than texting or voice calls, so it’s awesome to see Google implementing this!
Turn on Meet saver mode before a Meet video call to reduce data usage and conserve battery power. Saver mode limits CPU performance so your device’s charge lasts longer. Learn more about Meet saver mode.
Google Meet Help
In order to enable saver mode, just open the Meet app, tap the menu button (the three vertical dots), go to the settings icon or cogwheel, choose ‘Limit data usage’, and then join your video call via Calendar or directly through the Meet app itself. All of the aforementioned benefits will ‘automagically’ be applied to your session even though the option is only named after limiting data usage. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while this is a nice-to-have feature, you probably won’t be joining a video meeting with like, 10% battery, will you?
Aside from almost everyone still spending the majority of their time at home, there are chargers virtually everywhere for most of us. I’ve noticed a trend where Google is building out several features across its services with travel in mind, so it’s clear that they’re thinking about how to make things more useful post-pandemic. Will you be using saver mode at all? Will you leave it on or simply toggle it when needed? Perhaps Google can implement a system where it automatically turns on when battery saver mode is activated on a device with a low charge.
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