Easy-to-miss Samsung button ‘substantially’ boosts battery life instantly – you might not even notice the small downside
SAMSUNG has revealed an easy-to-miss trick that can instantly improve your battery life.
It’s part of a list of tweaks that Samsung says “substantially” boosts your charge.
If you’re always on your smartphone, it’s easy to run the battery down very quickly.
That’s especially true if you’re watching a lot of media, you’re using mobile internet, or you’re gaming intensively.
Samsung has shared a list of display settings that you can change to boost battery life.
And one great option is reducing the resolution of your display.
REDUCE SCREEN RESOLUTION ON SAMSUNG
The resolution of your screen is the number of pixels it has.
For instance, a 4K screen has more pixels (four times, in fact) than a Full HD 1080p display.
The benefit of having more pixels is that you can show more detail on the same surface area.
Imagine a 9 x 9 grid: if you painted them different colors, you’d struggle to show anything very detailed.
But if that grid is 900 x 900, suddenly you can show much greater detail.
Resolution is usually measured as a height by a width (or vice versa) of pixels – so that’s how you’ll see it in your Samsung settings.
When your Samsung phone is outputting higher-resolution content, it’s drawing more power.
But by reducing the resolution, you can unburden your battery.
And because a smartphone screen is very small, you might not even notice the difference visually.
To change it, go to Settings > Display > Change Screen Resolution.
The options will be different depending on your Samsung phone model.
But consider dropping down one or two tiers if the option is there to see how that benefits your phone’s battery life.
You can always change it back at any point.
Samsung charging tip – how to charge best
Here's Samsung's official advice...
To get the most out of your smartphone’s battery, you’ll need to charge it properly.
Most Smartphones have a lithium-ion battery that lives longer when charged regularly.
Unlike the nickel batteries used in older phones, lithium-ion batteries do best when kept above a 50 percent charge.
Repeatedly allowing the battery to drain fully may shorten its life and decrease its overall capacity.
If this happens, you’ll need to charge the battery more frequently and it may last only a few hours before needing a charge, for example.
Leaving the phone connected to the charger (when the phone is completely charged) while you are using it may lower battery life if you do it repeatedly.
Just note that sometimes apps you’ve got currently running will need to close and be relaunched if you changed the resolution.
SAMSUNG DISPLAY TWEAKS FOR BATTERY BOOST
There are some other changes that you can make to your display to help things along.
One option is to reduce the Screen Timeout delay.
That means your screen will become inactive after the last touch faster, conserving battery in the long run.
You can reduce it from the 30-second default timer to just 15 seconds in Settings > Display > Screen Timeout.
Another trick is to reduce brightness.
This is an extremely efficient way to reduce the burden on your battery – though you may need to deactivate Adaptive Brightness to keep it nice and low.
If you’ve got a phone with an AMOLED display, activating Dark Mode can conserve battery – because totally black parts of the screen don’t need to be illuminated.
And you can also turn on Accidental Touch Protection in Settings > Display to prevent your phone from being woken by mistake.