Gadgetory

everybody it's Michael with pocketnow.com and I am tired I was going to wait until tomorrow to record the host segment of this video so that I could appear a little bit fresher and maybe not get so many comments about how I look Spacey in my videos but then I thought no no this is the perfect allegory for what we're talking about today because humans get tired I'm tired you know what else gets tired smartphones alright I know it was a little bit of a weak comparison but this is the Samsung Galaxy s3 I've been using it for about a week and I've found its endurance to be on the high side of average for an Android smartphone it does better than my Galaxy Nexus LTE edition every smartphone does but it doesn't quite reach the point of the HTC One X that I was trying out a couple weeks ago which had pretty good battery life so we're going to check out today a few ways to get the most out of the battery on the samsung galaxy s3 it's pocket now let's take a look so there are certain steps that we've all become accustomed to taking when we really need to maximize every last second of battery life on our smart phones sure there are some third-party apps out there that'll do the trick for us but for this video let's stick to stock some of these measures include steps like shutting off as many radios as possible that includes things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and NFC and GPS some of these radios have more effect on the battery than others but they all impact at some what other things are good to do like checking your email polling interval to make sure that it's set to medium or long and make sure that you're not automatically syncing in the background with a service you set up back in happier days when you had more power things like Facebook and G+ polling in the background can really demolish your battery another huge drain on your power reserves is the display the sgs3 uses an AMOLED panel so it doesn't suck as much juice as an LCD with a backlight but it's still bound to be the biggest energy hog on the phone turning down the brightness is a big way to cut back on that consumption and while we're on the display killing any live wallpapers will definitely save you some clock cycles and therefore power as well finally there are the accessory features on the galaxy s3 that includes things like s-voice smart stay the LED lamp and more standard elements like the vibration motor all these can be tweaked manually but the galaxy s3 makes life easier for us in two main ways the first is the dashboard of toggles in the Android notification bar up top these allow us to quickly and easily enable and disable features that we only need at certain times like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and GPS and it also lets us do some triage if we really get into a critical phase giving us a means to kill notifications mobile data and sync as well you'll notice it also lets us jump right into something called power saving that's the second way the galaxy s3 makes life easier on those looking to conserve battery as on most Samsung phones there's a handy little readme file hidden away in the our saving menu that tells you all about what the mode does in brief enabling power saving mode does four main things it reduces the maximum clock speed of the CPU which does slow down the device a bit but it saves power and won't cripple you unless you try to play a graphically intense game or load a really heavy webpage it also reduces the frame rate and lowers the brightness on the display switches your email and browser backgrounds to black to reduce the number of illuminated pixels on the AMOLED display and it disables haptic feedback to stop the vibrate motor from wasting amp hours to really get the most out of the device you'll also want to hop into settings and then display and make sure auto adjust screen power is checked and also that your brightness is set to a low level using smart stay is a good idea to keep the device paying attention to when you are and are not looking at it if you're really trying to squeeze every second out of the phone you can adjust the backlight on the capacitive keys down here to time out sooner as well you can even go as far down as 1.5 seconds finally and for now this is specific to the galaxy s3 you'll want to hop into s-voice get on over to settings and make sure that you've either disabled the wake up command or set it to only listen while charging Samsung goes out of its way to tell you that s voice may drain the battery so this is a step you don't want to miss and if all else fails there's always airplane mode turn it on then turn it off periodically to check for messages then turn it back on it's the time-honored tradition of power starved smartphone owners everywhere if you've got some more tips for saving power on your smartphone be it a Galaxy s3 or something else drop us a line in the comments at the post at pocketnow.com otherwise give us a thumbs up if you liked the video stay tuned for the next one it'll be coming probably sooner than you think and thanks a lot for watching i'm michael fisher with pocket now i'm gonna go get some sleep see you next time everybody it's Michael with pocketnow.com for now let's keep the discussion two steps sorry