[Sprint Samsung Galaxy Note 3] topherk:
Welcome back to the wonderful world of Android. My name is Topher and for the next 5 minutes or so, I'll be your guide to getting the most out of the Note 3. Sometimes, in order to help you, I'll need more information, so I'll ask questions. Since I end up writing very long responses, I'll try to bold all of my questions so they stand out more easily... I'm not internet-yelling at you in those instances.

Ok, introductions are now out of the way, let's try to get your phone working as you want it. I've grouped your questions/concerns into various groups so that we can address each one individually.

E-mail lag

You mentioned that you have a few different accounts, what e-mail services are you using? I ask because if all of the accounts are gmail, you can use the gmail app, which I find deals with the transitions a bit better than the original e-mail app that Samsung has.

If you have various services (yahoo, gmail, outlook, etc), a good option is

CloudMagic

. There are good reviews on the app and have gotten good reviews from blogs.

Another option (although probably less appealing) is using a distinct e-mail app for each service.

Yahoo

has an app, so does

Outlook

.

Battery Life

This is a big black box, since it's tough to say exactly what's causing it. I can typically get between 15-18 hours of battery life before I have to charge it up (I typically will charge when it drops below 30%). I've listed the various ways that I've seen that can help (or hurt) battery life below.

Signal Strength

For me, this is the number-one cause of battery drain. If I'm in an area with solid 4G signal, my battery life is great. It's a lot worse when I'm in areas where my phone is constantly switching between 4G and 3G (thanks a lot, Sprint!). The main cause is that, when searching, the phone boosts power to the radios and they just end up using more juice.

Also, having Bluetooth, GPS, and Wifi on (but not connected to anything) all the time will increase battery usage. These radios are regularly searching, so turning them off can help out.

One thing about Wifi, though... Being consistently connected to Wifi will significantly increase battery life, since you have a solid data connection and the phone doesn't need to search 4G and 3G bands as regularly in order to have service.

Screen Brightness

TThis is one item that is typically overlooked in terms of battery life. With high phone usage (games, internet, answering XDA questions), I've seen my battery drain 15% in under an hour when using high brightness. If I lower the brightness to half or lower, the battery drain is as low as 5% per hour.

Leaving the brightness on Auto is ok, but I've found that adjusting it myself is easier (I have a slide bar in the notification panel) and more effective in terms of battery life (you're not using an additional sensor to read the ambient light levels).

Rogue Apps

One cause of battery drain is

wakelocks

. Basically, when you're not using your phone, it's supposed to go to into "sleep mode," where the CPU and radios aren't drawing much power. A phone call, e-mail sync, or other things cause a wakelock and basically wake the phone up.

Rouge Apps are ones that cause a lot of wakelocks that eat up a lot of battery life. Once way to counter-act them is to find out which ones they are. Nowadays on Android, the battery info screen (Settings -> General -> Battery) gives good, detailed information on battery usage.

From this screen, obviously the fact that I had my screen on all the time is what caused the battery drain. I had it on full brightness, which didn't help. Also, during that time, I was checking out the various cat memes on Reddit, so that was also active and using up CPU strength and battery (but not nearly as much as the screen).

If you click on the graph, you get this screen:

This one shows the various system resources that were using up battery life (not associating them with apps). As you can see, there were times where I was driving through an area with little-to-no cell service (again, thanks Sprint). In those times, it's likely that my phone was using up more battery. But the biggest drain (when the graph really dips down) is when I have the screen on and when the phone is awake (obviously, those cat photos aren't going to view themselves!). If you see in your graph that there's a lot of battery drain when the screen is off, you might have a Rouge App causing a lot of wakelocks.

If you have a lot of wakelocks, you can find out which apps are causing them using an app like

Better Battery Stats

. This was developed mostly when the Android Battery screen gave little-to-no information, so you might not get as much additional info as you'd like, but it's a good app to keep in your back pocket when investigating wakelocks.

One way to quarantine rogue apps is to use

Greenify

(

XDA link

). It'll basically put those apps in a hibernation mode, which prevents them from waking the phone. It may break some functionality of the rogue app which rely on waking up the phone, but when the app is actively running (i.e. open on the screen), greenify doesn't touch it.

Hopefully these suggestions will get you started on your way to great battery life. There's one more thing I'd like to address, and that is ROMs.

Custom ROMs

You didn't explicitly state that you wanted to try out custom ROMs to solve your issues, but I'd be remiss if I didn't address them. In case you don't know what a custom ROM is, it's basically just a custom version of the phone OS which has been developed.

There are many great developers out here that create custom ROMs. Some focus on creating custom themed ROMs with tons of additional features, other focus on ROMs that strip out all of the extra TouchWiz bloatware that Samsung (and Sprint) add onto the phone. Some developers focus on maximizing battery life, while others focus on making a "stock android" (AOSP) experience. Finding the right ROM for you

I'd recommend browsing through the various ROMs in the Development Section of the forum. If you read the posts, various users will give their battery life using that particular ROM (as it's important to most of us here).

In Closing

If you've read this far, congratulations! I can't believe you actually read the entirety of this giant post I made. Kudos!

Anyways, if you have any more questions, just reply to this post and I'll try to answer them as much as I can.

I hope this helps!