[Galaxy Note 4 General] Willem1975:
Powersaving / extend battery life

On rooted and non-rooted Note 4 devices.

There are quite a few battery saving tools on the playstore market. However, most of these tools only use what your device can already do by itself. Besides that, it is one more app that can and will consume power so the overall effect of these apps is very limited.

Here is a lot of stuff you can do by yourself to save power and increase battery life. Although most forum users will already have some knowledge on the way your phone works I will begin this post with the most obvious tips on power saving.

Obviously, the list below is a list of possibilities, and not a list of stuff you should do immediately while reading this post. Just look carefully which functions you really use which you don’t. Every option can save a little bit of battery, but together they make quite a difference.

I am quite a heavy user and at this point my phone can do 1,5 to 2 full days without a charge.

General:

1 Turn your GPS of if you are not using it

2 Turn your Wifi of when not using it

3 Turn your Bluetooth of when… (you get the idea)

4 Same goes for NFC

System settings:

Display and wallpaper:

Use auto brightness and set it to your liking. There 10 different levels of auto brightness. I have found that level 2 or 3 is not only sufficient but friendlier to my eyes.

If you really want to get most out of your battery, it’s possible to have a completely black wallpaper image. Black doesn’t take any power so this will save you a lot during a full day of work. I always have one black wallpaper in my preferred wallpaper list.

Smart stay

. With smart stay on, the device will stay on while looking at it. Now you can reduce the

screen time out mode to 15 seconds

. Actually works pretty well and saves a lot of power.

Activate

auto adjust screen tone

.

Turn daydream off.

Turn led indicator off.

Touch key light duration on “always off” or 1,5 seconds.

Increase touch sensitivity off.

Lockscreen:

It really helps if your lock screen just has a black wallpaper.

Unless you really need to, don’t make your screen lock too complicated. The fingerprint scanner seems pretty cool but really isn’t. It often takes several swipes to get it to work and that takes power as well.

Personally I use non at home and a simple pattern outside. I use the tasker app to automate this but I will talk some more about specific apps after the general settings.

Multiwindow:

Although the multi-window function is one of the things that makes the Note series the king of Phablets, a lot of users hardly ever use these functions. If you are one of these users, turn this function off. The hone keeps checking which apps you can or can’t use in this function evertime you open an app, or open your recent apps. This takes power and CPU.

Even if you are a multi window user, the 2 listed options:

Open in split screen view & pop up view shortcut aren’t used by many. If you don’t use them, turn them off.

S pen:

Same thing here, look at the options You really use during the day.

I do find

Air command

a very useful function and personally I always keep it on. If you don’t use it, you know what to do by now.

Under

Air view

there are the following options to turn off if not used by you:

Information preview / Preview info, extend text, or enlarge pictures hovering over them

Icon Labels / View the labels of icon by hovering over them

List scrolling / Scroll up or down by holding the pen over the edge of the screen

Link preview / Hovering over a link will show you a preview of the page

Air menu / Hover the pen over the action or attach button to add content or contacts

Motions and gestures:

Again. Turn everything off that you are not using.

Direct call / By bringing the phone to your ear it will call the contact on the screen

Smart alert / Device will vibrate when you pick it up to notify you about missed calls and messages

Mute/pause / I don’t think this option will affect your battery life

Palm swipe to capture / I have no idea who thought this would be a good option to add. Turn it off if you agree.

Cloud:

I have rooted and installed ROMS and apps on many phones of friends. What seems odd to me is that most people have at least 3 cloud storage spaces were the automatically store all their pictures. Some them even had 4 or 5 without realizing.

1 Samsung account,

2 Picasa / google,

3 Dropbox.

One of these will do just fine. You can have more but just don’t let them auto-upload your camera pics. If every picture you take has to upload to 3 or more different cloud spaces, your device will be working more than it should have to.

Backup data:

Same story. Pick one. Stick to it. Don’t have 3 backup accounts.

Accessibility:

Vision and hearing / Turn off unless you need them

Dexterity and interaction :

•	Assistant menu / Off

•	Air wake up / Off

•	Press and hold delay / 0.5 seconds

•	Interaction control / Off

Direct access / Off

Answering / ending calls / Look at what suits you best. Picking up quickly will save battery over the phone ringing longer.

Powersaving:

Whats in a name ha? The powersaving mode can be adjusted which means you can get to saave power in the way you find most efficient.

The options are:

1 Restrict background data.

•	This option limits the stuff you can do on your phone rather drastically. Dowloading content, viewing multi media and sending messages. Personally I never use this as this makes my phone just as useless as a phone with an empty battery 

2 Restrict performance, which has 4 sub options:

•	1 CPU performance / This machine has enough power to do pretty much everything with this option on except for some high performance games perhaps.

•	2 Screen output / Usefull to have turned on when in need of extra battery life.

•	3 Turn off touch key light / Usefull to do when needing power.

•	4 Turn of GPS / Which I already only turn on when needed.

3 Grayscale Mode

•	This option doesn’t affect your performance but just makes you entire phone black and white. This grayscale mode saves a lot of power and you will still be able to do all the work stuff like browsing, mailing, texting, etc…

Ultra power saving mode:

In this mode your phone can last for several days but its use is very limited. You can browse the web, call and text but that’s pretty much it.

I think this would come in very handy if the end off the world has come, all power is gone, and you want to be the very last person to send a text 

Just kidding. If this is what gets you home on a few percent of power, it comes in very handy.

Look at the standby time when you turn it on. It’s amazing how long a phone can last in this mode.

Widget use:

Widgets can save or cost you power. There are very useful widgets that give you quick access to wifi, GPS, Bluetooth and other power saving stuff on your home screen. Besides easy access you will become more awre of the fact that you have a lot of stuff on that really doesn’t need to ben on at the moment.

Other widgets can cost you lots of power and data. This mainly depends on the amount of data the widget has to download and the refresh interval. For example: If you have a Facebook widget on one of your home screens that refreshes every 15 minutes, that means it will go and download new content from facebook every 15 minutes. This costs you data (when not on Wifi), but also battery life.

So look carefully at the widgets you use before installing them on your homescreens if you want your battery to last.

Launchers and home screens:

By organizing your favorite and most used applications you will be able to open them faster and so it will shorten your screen on time.

Personally, I think you should be able to open every app within 2 seconds. If you have many apps, and the only way to open them is scrolling to several pages of app drawer, your doing something wrong.

The beauty of Android is the fact that it is the most customizable system out there so use it! Combine widgets, apps, shortcuts, and folders until you have everything within reach.

When using TouchWizz launcher, it really helps to turn of Briefing on your home screen. This makes the phone slower and it costs battery life and data usage.

Many Samsung users have come to terms with the fact that TouchWizz will never be the best launcher out there (And that’s the understatement of the f@&1ng century).

That’s why most heavy users will install a third party launcher as a home screen replacement. The one most used is probably Nova Launcher.

Playstore link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoilsw.launcher

Youtube tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO52dfFm40o

I have found after installing this launcher and setting it up, my battery life increased with 7-9% on a full days use. At this point I haven’t figured out if this is only because I navigate more efficiently, or that there are other reasons aswel.

The benefit of a third party launcher is more customization for your home screens and app drawer (such as making categories is the app drawer and such). But also to have gesture control, for example: Have apps open when swipning up or down, with one or multiple finger, double tap, home button and so on.

This gives you much easier and faster acces to your most used apps.

Other usefull apps for powersaving:

Tasker is an app that lets you automate tasks on your phone. For example letting your phone detect when you are at home, and automatically turn on wifi, turn of GPS and your lockscreen pattern.

Tasker does not have to let GPS run for these task and can also turn everything around when you leave home. The amount options on tasker is pretty much unlimited and these automated tasks can save a lot of power thus increasing battery-life .

Playstore link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm

Youtube tutorial(s):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzY9te12UI0&list=PLjV3HijScGMynGvjJrvNNd5Q9pPy255dL

Tasker is not an easy to use in 2 minutes app. It will take some time and effort to really get into it, but beside winning a lot of battery life, it will let you automate pretty much anything you can think of.

Rooted users:

For rooted users there are many more options to save power and increase battery life.

I am just going to mention a couple:

•	Limiting your CPU frequency. Your note 4 has a surplus of power and you will never need it all unless you play high performance games. You can limit the frequency completely, or make profiles that change the frequency as your battery level decreases. Personally I use the app SetCPU to do this.

Playstore link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mhuang.overclocking

•	Freezing or uninstalling bloatware. A lot of stuff on your android phone you will never use. I always use Chrome as my browser so I won’t keep the original browser Samsung gave me on my phone. This goes for many apps. I use 2 applications to freeze and/or uninstall apps from my phone to free up memory, RAM and save battery life:

SD Maid (also limited functions for non rooted users)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.thedarken.sdm

Titanium Backup (also the best backup app I have found sofar)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup

Both these apps let you freeze and uninstall bloatware. Be carefull though! Do not just start deleting everything that doesn’t look familiar, or you will get in trouble.

Freeze apps first and see if ervything keeps working. Then make sure you do a Nandroid backup within TWRP or CWM recovery before definitely uninstalling apps.

There are several lists available on the web which show what can possibly be frozen and/or deleted. This is one I found quite useful:

http://www.reddit.com/r/galaxynote4/comments/2pgiib/the_ultimate_list_of_removablefreezable_bloatware/

Custom ROMs:

There are many custom ROMs that are more friendly for your battery then the stock firmware. However, if you are new to rooting and installing custom ROMS please be carefull and watch the tutorials before you start flashing away.

A good site to begin is:

http://galaxynote4root.com/

From XDA Senior Member:

Zedomax (Profile http://xdaforums.com/member.php?u=2447605)

Many thanks Max. You are the one that got me hooked on this stuff!

Suggestions:

If you have any suggestions or comments on this subject, feel free to share them below.