Friday 12 October 2012

8 Ways to Conserve Samsung S3's Battery

I am really impressed with the longevity of the Samsung S3's battery. It can get me through to 3 days without recharging with my normal use. Wifi when I am home, 3G or HSPA when out, bluetooth on and mp3 player on for at least 30 minutes when I travel by car, and up to 3 to 5 calls in a day. I am not really a gaming fan but I do sometimes play chess to kill time when picking up my son from school. At the end of the third day I still have at least 35% of power before I start filling up again. This is far more than my previous phones that can only do at most a day and a half with my kind of phone activity.

How to do it? Do you need a program to do it? Here are simple tricks!

1. Adjust screen brightness to a comfortable level.

Obviously, the larger the screen the more power the screen can consume. In my case the screen is the second  greediest in consuming the most power. Setting it to a low but comfortable brightness can throttle down the power that is going to this part of the phone, but not necessarily to set  it to it's lowest, that you may need to adjust it again to get a better view of what's on the screen. You can also try to set it into auto mode, and if you are comfortable with the output, leave it.

Setting >Display>Brightness




2. Use darker wallpaper and home screen.

The brighter the screen the more power it is consumed. Lesser light is used to display darker images and more light with lighter ones. Putting this in the equation, using a darker theme can also extend the battery life. 

On Google Play, search for dark wallpapers. One interesting app is Picspeed HD wallpapers 300,000. There is a wide selection of exciting and pretty wallpapers to choose from. Open the app and tap all categories. The categories are arranged alphabetically. Go to the black classification and download a dark wallpaper from there. Once downloaded, you can set it as your home and lock screen photos.



3. Screen Timeout

Set the screen time out to the maximum time you think that you need or comfortable with before the screen goes blank. Too soon  will only waste your time in pressing the button of the unit to bring it to life. Anyway you can turn the screen off when you are finished with it by pressing the power button quickly.

Setting>Display>ScreenTimeout(under general)


4. Turn Off Smart Stay

This feature is great when reading something without the screen turning blank when it reached the set timeout. But this feature uses the front camera in order to function, and again using an extra muscle of the processor and draining the battery power.

Setting>Display>SmartStay(under general)


5. Change screen mode

By default, the S3 is set to standard screen mode, setting it into movie mode will make the images in your phone less vivid and less bright. This may not be suitable to everyone's taste and may make your phone images unattractive but this will surely contribute more to the battery power.

Settings>Display>Screen Mode(under screen)



6. Tick auto adjust screen tone.

This automates the rendering of  brightness and tone when viewing photos. Less light, means less power consumed.

7. Enable built in power saving mode.

Instead of downloading apps that can help in extending the range of battery power, use the built in power saving feature which lets you in control of the processes within your phone to conserve battery like adjusting the CPU performance especially when you are not in gaming mode. It automatically reduces the screen frame rate and lowers brightness, turns off the vibrate function or the haptic feedback when pressing a function button.


8. Turn off connectivity when not in use

When away from your home router, turning off the wifi button saves power. As long as the wifi is on, it will continuously keeps on looking for wifi signals, thus using power without any benefit. The same with bluetooth connection. When you do not intend to use your bluetooth earpiece or away from your car's bluetooth connectivity, turn it off. Turning the mobile data traffic off when you do not intend to use the internet whilst away from your home is also a good way of saving the battery life. Whilst using the internet and you suffer from an intermittent data signal, it is also more sensible to turn off this button because the strain of the power goes to the radio button searching for decent signals, resulting in more battery drain than productivity.

During the night, you can turn off all connectivity by turning the flight mode button on. You can do this by pressing the power button for a few seconds. This doesn't affect the wake up alarm you've set in.




My Thoughts

Doing two or more of these steps can make a difference on the battery's life but it is possible to really extend the power of up to six days without recharging with light usage, using all it's built in power saving features you know and with being sensible to know the time when we need to turn off the features we do not really need at a particular time.

This does reduce the wear and tear of plugging in and out the connectors, and of course adding  further life to the battery's life cycle.




It's about time to get an S3 whilst the price has gone down! Online only deal!




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