Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge (Photo : Samsung)
Reviews of Samsung's two new babies, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, have been great but greatness comes at a price. That price is drained batteries.
This might be a big issue for some users that complain of both smartphones having non-replaceable batteries like the Apple iPhone. And long battery life is a must for feature-rich handsets like the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge that come with powerful processors and loads of software features that are, naturally, power-hungry.
Here are some ways to make sure your Samsungs don't run out of juice when you need it:
For one, it's wise to disable pre-installed apps you'll probably never use. Doing this will save you a little bit of battery power and that extra juice might come in handy with the apps you do need. You can always re-enable the disabled apps later if you want to use them.
You can also save previous power by turning-off VoLTE, the acronym for Voice over LTE that allows you to place a phone call over your LTE connection instead of the more common voice networks. In Asia, VoLTE is available in only a few countries, the most notable of which are Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. It's still being tried out in the U.S. and China.
A bug in the firmware of Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge causes the use of VoLTE to drain a lot of battery power, so turning off VoLTE is a wise choice when you're not using this feature.
You've also got to turn off Smart Switch. You can do this by going from Settings to Wi-Fi, to More, to Smart network switch and finally, to Off.
Minimizing the display brightness is a great power boost. The bright and gorgeous display on the S6 consumes most of the battery's power. Minimizing the brightness helps save power because the higher the brightness, the more power the phone uses.
Choosing the Manual brightness setting over the Automatic brightness is a good option since the Automatic option will drain more battery power. You can always manually increase the brightness when you're outdoors and manually reduce when you're back indoors.
Another power saving tip is to go to Settings then go to Battery. Here, you'll see two options: Power Saving Mode and Ultra Power Saving Mode. Power Saving Mode will disable a few key features but won't degrade phone's performance.
The Ultra Power Saving will make your phone disable all features, except for a few key apps. It will also reduce battery usage by almost 50 percent. If you're planning to take a long trip, it would be wise to turn on the Ultra Power Saving feature.
