Samsung officially reveals battery life tricks to ‘keep device powered on all day’ – don’t ignore ‘color setting’ tweak
SAMSUNG has revealed some easy tricks to instantly slash the power your smartphone is using – giving you a quick battery life boost.
If your Samsung Galaxy smartphone is always running out of charge, it’s worth taking a look at your settings.
One of the main factors affecting your phone’s charge is the size of the battery cell.
You don’t have much control over that once you already own the phone, so your only real option is to change how you use your smartphone.
Samsung warns of the nightmare scenarios where you’re “forced to pull out a portable power bank or, worse, sit next to a wall plug for an hour.”
And the company adds that “if your phone is struggling to keep up with your work schedule, here are a few ways to keep the device powered on all day, and then some.”
SAMSUNG BATTERY LIFE TIP #1
You’ll definitely want to check your battery app usage.
Plenty of apps stay active in the background, consuming battery life without you even realizing it.
But thankfully, your Samsung phone has some settings to help you reduce some of this “vampire” battery drain.
Just head into Settings > Battery and Device Care > Battery > Background Usage Limits.
Then you can choose which apps to limit in terms of their background activity.
“For Google Maps, Spotify and other streaming apps, make sure to pre-download maps, playlists and podcasts over Wi-Fi before you go out,” Samsung says.
“You can also turn off notifications from other apps and limit their background activity. Collectively, these changes conserve significant battery life.”
SAMSUNG BATTERY LIFE TIP #2
Second, consider changing the color theme of your smartphone.
Many modern Samsung phones now feature AMOLED displays that can shut the light off for specific pixels to show true black.
Dark mode is specifically designed to reduce battery life and be easy on the eyes later in the day.
Samsung
That means by using a dark theme, you can get battery life savings.
“On Android, go to your phone’s Launcher app by holding down an empty part of your home screen and click on Settings,” Samsung advises.
“From there, you can choose different colored wallpapers and toggle between light and dark themes for other screens.
“The latest Samsung smartphones, including the new Galaxy S23 series as well as the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Galaxy Z Flip4 foldables, also feature a Dark mode that is specifically designed to reduce battery life and be easy on the eyes later in the day.”
Why do batteries get worse over time?
Here's what you need to know...
- Most gadgets run on lithium-ion batteries
- Over time, the amount of charge this type of battery can hold gets smaller
- That means you need to charge your device more often because they hold less charge
- Batteries have two electrode points – the cathode and the anode
- To charge a battery, the ions inside the battery are forced from the cathode to the anode
- When you use a battery, it moves in the reverse direction
- This process wears away at the structure of the anode, reducing its ability to function correctly
- But the process also builds up a kind of salt on the cathode when charging
- As this build-up grows, the battery will accept less charge over time
- It’s estimated that between 500 and 1,000 full charge-cycles will reduce a battery’s maximum capacity by roughly 20%
SAMSUNG BATTERY LIFE TIP #3
The third tip is to reduce the amount of time it takes for your Samsung phone’s screen to go to sleep.
Smartphone displays are power-hungry, so you want to limit how much time your phone is needlessly illuminating the screen.
Just go to Settings > Display and look for the Screen Timeout feature.
This lets you bring the Screen Timeout right down to 15 seconds.
If you feel like that’s too short, you can adjust it to a higher timeout whenever you like.