Hi everyone, so we're going to be talking about battery life
on the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. A lot of people have
been concerned that the smaller battery in the
S6 is going to cause them a problem. Now,
battery life is a very subjective thing, everybody uses their devices
differently for different levels of
time doing different types of task so it's not always easy to kind of draw
a definitive from this necessarily. But what we can do is discuss what you can do
to
save battery life and the things that impact on your battery
during a day to day operation. Now one of the first things to always be aware
of
is what options your actual Android operating system has and specifically
from the Galaxy S6
to save you battery life. So some of the things you can kind of do here,
if you come into battery we can go in here,
whoops, go in to battery, hit the right option this time.
We can see how much battery we have, how much battery we have left and then we've got a
couple of options here.
Now power saving mode will eke out some additional battery,
essentially by lowering the brightness of the screen the CPU
turning off things like vibration, the touch lights and so on, basically anything
kind of unnecessary that you don't need just to
use the device, the optional extras, the bells and whistles
effectively can be turned off. Now you can set that to come on it any point you want or
immediately,
so run it all the time. I tend to leave mine at 20%
give me an additional 10% battery power once we get to that point so
it hits 20% and realistically once it goes into this lower power mode I have around 30% of
the battery left.
The other option is ultra power saving mode.
Now this one turns off basically the entire Android operating system,
other than a basic overlay that provides
access to your phone, your text messages,
and basic functionality. I mean this really does turn your smartphone
back into a dumbphone for all intents and purposes but in doing so
you will dramatically increase the battery life. But let's talk about the things that really
impact battery because it might not always seem quite so obvious.
For instance, you'll be aware that running the screen,
actually having the screen turned on is probably the biggest
single drain you will have on a smart device but also it goes a little bit
further than that because depending on what your
device is doing, so for instance if you're playing a game, you're running the
CPU
and the screen simultaneously and that is going to
decrease the battery life. But likewise
if you happen to be playing that game multi-player you're also running the wifi
or your cell at the same time. Again you've added to that battery drain.
But there's something you might not be aware of. If you happen to have
a weak wifi signal or even a weak cell signal
your device will use more power to maintain
a signal lock. Now what does this mean?
Well, in real terms, if you say only have one or two bars of cell,
or one or two bars of wifi the phone will use more power
thinking it needs a stronger signal and in doing so it would drain
the battery more. You can know this and you'll have experienced
it yourself because if you've ever been in the countryside with just one bar
you might have thought, hang on, why is my battery running down so quickly, you've gone out for the day and
it's only lasted four hours instead of eight.
It hasn't been an app left on in the background, it's the fact that
your cell has essentially been trying desperately to keep
a strong or as strong a signal as it can onto a cell tower
and to do so it's had to boost more power through that transmitter
and receiver. Essentially the best way to try and keep your battery life
running as peak performance during the day is to keep one eye on
how well your device is connected to wifi and cell. Obviously if it's sat in your
pocket it still needs to be talking to the cell network to receive
notifications.
To do that it has to have a strong signal as it perceives it.
So if you happen to be in a rural area consider whether you actually need the cell
turned on
anyway to receive notifications for a couple of hours. Take some time to walk in the
countryside and just
disconnect. You'll find that if you keep one eye
on that cell and wifi there and how strong those signals are, especially if you're
someone who
moves around a lot between cell sites or between wifi sites
say between in a building, or in a town, you might find because you're
constantly connecting and disconnecting from weaker signals
that your battery is not lasting as long as it could do. What else can we do to
kind of help our battery life? Well also always take a look at what your auto brightness
is doing.
Because in different scenarios you might find that actually the auto brightness
is over governing the screen and actually running it hotter than it needs to
effectively draining your battery when it just doesn't need to. You can see here
I've actually got two very, very, large 5,000 watt bulbs right now
coming onto this desk and yet the auto brightness still thinks it needs to be
pumped up
massively high. It doesn't, in actual fact I could turn that off
and drop it down to about there and for me personally still looking at this device
I can still see everything on the screen,
maybe not quite so easy for you at home but my point
is quite simply that the auto brightness on most smartphones isn't actually very
good.
It doesn't tend to actually pick up the ambient light quite as well as it picks
up direct sunlight.
Again that may mean that you're running
your screen brightness much higher than really does need to be
to be comfortable to use the screen but also to preserve battery life.
Your other thing is location location location.
You'll have heard this many times before but just watch out for what your location
settings are actually doing.
Because if you happen to have GPS wifi AGPS turned on
and cell location turned on simultaneously
you're effectively hitting your system with the triple whammy of location
hookups. What will first happen is it will try and grab a GPS,
requiring quite a lot of power. It can't get a GPS because there's cloud cover it's wasted
that power
instead it will then switch to wifi. Your wifi signal's not good enough, you've wasted
some power there.
So then we'll switch to cell and cell, well yes, it will always be able to triangulate using
AGPS and WiFi
to get you a fix. However you've just used a ridiculous amount of power
in a very short period of time just to find out where you are.
In actual fact you might very well have been better off
turning off GPS, turning off wifi and just using the AGPS
triangulation from your cell sites. In most cases that will actually provide
a pretty good lock on for what you need and it hasn't required
three attempts to get there each one using progressively less power as it got
down the line.
So there's a quick and simple and dirty look at
things you can do to preserve battery life not just on a Galaxy S6 but
actually on
any smartphone be that an iPhone or an Android device or even a
Microsoft Lumia. At the end of the day keeping one eye on what the device
is actually
doing at different points during your journey and your daily routine
could help you eke out 10 to 15% more battery
just by being little bit proactive.