While the Samsung Galaxy S6 is perfectly suited to be incredibly capable under heavy usage and multitasking, sometimes you want to eke out every minute you possibly can from the battery. Thankfully, the Samsung Galaxy S6 includes lots of settings an features to help your battery last as long as you do. Here are some tips and tricks:
Tame the Wildest Beast
Usually the biggest battery hog on any modern touchscreen device is the screen itself. It takes a lot of juice to power all those thousands of individually lit pixels with different colors and brightnesses, and the Galaxy S6 is no slouch in the pixel count department. The biggest boost to your battery is to simply keep your screen off as long and as often as possible. When not possible, however, make sure to turn down the screen brightness, or use the automatic brightness setting that sets the screen brightness for you based on available environmental light.
- Turn down your screen’s brightness level through Quick Toggles by dragging down the Notification Drawer, then enabling the checkbox next to the brightness slider (just below the quick toggles).
- Keep your screen from using too much battery by keeping the Screen Timeout set low. You can edit this setting by going to the Settings app, tapping the Display menu on the Device page, then picking a time limit in the Screen Timeout menu.
- A darker wallpaper will help your battery life as well. More pixels at a lower brightness means less power is being used. To learn how to change your wallpaper, check out our article Samsung Galaxy S6 Home screen Tips & Tricks.
Wrangle in the Wire(less)
The latest and greatest devices come equipped with the latest and greatest wireless technologies. That’s what makes it a cell phone, right? Unfortunately, with every new kind of wireless connectivity, you also add a new drain to your battery life. Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, and GPS are all amazing and useful tools, and they all use power.
- Turn off unused network modes. If your carrier doesn’t use LTE, then neither should you: it’s a battery hog. Unless you’re doing something data intensive like downloading photos or watching videos, it’s safe to keep LTE off. To turn off LTE on your Galaxy S6, go to the Connections page in the Settings app and tap on Mobile Networks, then Mobile Data. Uncheck Enhanced 4G LTE Services to turn off the LTE radio.
- Wi-Fi uses less battery than LTE (the highest speed data connection carriers provide at the moment), and there’s generally no need to have both on at the same time.
- Keep Bluetooth and NFC turned off unless actively using them. You can turn off both using quick toggles in the Notification Drawer. Check out our article How to Customize Quick Toggles on Samsung Galaxy S6.
- Unless you’re getting navigation directions or playing a game that requires your exact location, GPS can also be turned off using quick toggles.
There’s an App for That
The next biggest battery drain on your Galaxy S6 is simply doing stuff, and doing stuff generally involves using apps. Unfortunately, apps are often running even when you’re not actively using them. Usually they’re working in the background, downloading or listening for changes, or doing some other kind of process. You can help rein in background power consumption of apps with a couple tricks.
- Get a list of currently running apps by tapping on Applications in the Device page of the Settings app, then tapping on Application Manager and swiping over to the Running page. This shows a list of currently running tasks and applications, and and overview of the RAM currently being used. As a general rule (although not always the case), apps using more RAM are also using more power.
- You can close currently running apps by opening up the Recents carousel by clicking the Recents key and swiping the app away to the left or right.
- Another potential battery hog is notifications. The more apps that use and send notifications, the more battery is used, from both getting the notification itself, and new notifications turning on the screen when it’s off. Check out our article How to Manage Notifications on Samsung Galaxy S6.
Extreme Measures
If all the previous measures aren’t enough, the Samsung Galaxy S6 brings even more power saving features to squeeze the absolute most out of your battery. Check them out:
- Turn on Power Saving Mode. “Save battery power by limiting the maximum CPU performance, reducing screen brightness and frame rate, turning off the touch key light, turning off Vibration feedback, and reducing the time before the screen is turned off when notifications are received.” You can turn this mode on either through a quick toggle, or navigating to the Battery menu under System in the Settings app, then tapping on Power Saving mode.
- Ultra Power Saving mode, is as the name implies, an extremely battery-conservative mode you can put your phone in. In Ultra Power Saving mode the phone turns off as many features as possible and locks down lots of functionality. When in this mode, you are limited to a total of six apps: Phone, Messages, Internet, and three optional apps you select. Turn on UPS either with a quick toggle or going to the Battery menu under System in the Settings app, then tapping on Ultra Power Saving mode.
For even more Galaxy S6 articles, check out our Samsung Galaxy S6 Tips & Tricks Roundup
