Always running out of juice in the middle of the day with your new Samsung Galaxy Note 7? Here’s our expert tips and tricks for extending the Note 7’s battery life.
As much as we love the Galaxy Note 7, we wish that Samsung’s latest and greatest phablet was blessed with better battery life. Thankfully there are plenty of little tricks that you can use to extend the Note 7’s longevity, and get the best possible performance from that 3,500mAh battery.
Check out our massive Note 7 tips and tricks guide to learn about Samsung’s best hidden features.
Temporarily boost the Note 7’s battery life with the Power Saving Modes
First, head to the Note 7’s settings menu and jump to Device Maintenance. In here you’ll spot a ‘Battery’ button, down at the bottom of the screen. Give this a tap and you’ll see the Note 7’s predicted battery life, plus various options for giving your remaining time a boost.
If you’re almost out of juice and desperate to keep the Note 7 alive and kicking a bit longer, select one of the Power Saving Mode options. ‘Mid’ will dim your screen and drop the resolution, ease back on performance and prevent apps from going online unless you’re actively using them. This should give you an extra hour or two of use, if your battery’s close to drained.
If it’s proper brown trousers time, then the ‘Max’ option will be a better choice. This does all of the above and also limits you to the most basic apps, such as calls and texts. It’s a great way to get hours of life from the battery dregs, as long as you aren’t planning on browsing Facebook all day.
Both of the above modes can also be tweaked to your liking, by tapping on them and selecting ‘customise’. For instance, you can drop the screen resolution to HD or Full HD, or change the peak display brightness.
Stop apps from sapping the Note 7’s battery power
To get better battery life in general, you can use Samsung’s Device Maintenance tool to see which apps are draining power and stop them from being such battery hogs.
Head to Settings and then Device Maintenance, then give the Battery button a tap. Scroll down and you’ll see the ‘App Power Monitor’ section, which details exactly how much battery life is drained by your favourite apps.
If any of those figures are particularly high, that means the app could be churning away in the background, eating up your Note 7’s power when you’re not even using it. To stop that from happening, tap any offenders in the list and you should see a blue tick appear next to them. When you’re finished, hit the ‘Save Power’ button at the top of the list.
This basically puts your selected apps to sleep when you’re not actively using them. While that means you won’t get notifications from them, alerting you to any new messages you might have received and so on, it also means better battery life overall.
Read next: The seven best features of the Galaxy Note 7
Bonus tips for improving the Note 7’s battery life
There are lots of little ways you can extend the Note 7’s battery life even further.
One of the main drains is the Note 7’s mighty screen, so make sure you have auto brightness activated. This automatically dims the screen when you’re in a more ambient environment, and only pumps it up when you’re in a brightly lit area. Just head to Settings and then Display, and make sure the Auto box next to the Brightness slider is ticked.
We also recommend the ‘Keep screen turned off’ feature in the Display settings menu. This can tell if your Note 7 is in a pocket or bag and the power button accidentally gets bumped, to prevent the screen from powering on.
The Always On Display is another decent way to save battery life. This shows the date, time, current battery level and any notifications that are waiting from your first-party apps. In other words, lots of important info that you might otherwise power on your phone to check. Head to Settings, Display and then Always On Display to activate this feature and tweak the layout. You can even have it activate and deactivate at set times.
Got any battery saving tips for the Note 7? Let us know in the comments below.
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