Battery-Savvy Tech Habits: Embracing Your Phone's Energy Conservation Mode Daily

Battery-Savvy Tech Habits: Embracing Your Phone’s Energy Conservation Mode Daily

Key Takeaways

• Battery life is crucial; try using battery saver mode for a better quality of life, without much impact on performance.
• Lowering CPU speed and screen brightness, disabling 5G, and setting charge limits can significantly extend phone battery life.
• Full phone performance can easily be toggled back with a swipe and a tap, making battery saver mode a convenient feature for everyday use.

As time has gone on I’ve started to value battery life more and more in my phone, which has lead to the rather drastic decision to run it in battery saver mode most of the time. Surprisingly, this hasn’t resulted in any notable downsides when actually using my phone, so you might want to try it too!

My Phone Is Already Overkill

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, which is already two models behind as of this writing. Despite its advanced age in technology terms, it’s still massively over-specified for my daily needs. So, even with the 30% cut to processing speed when using battery saver mode, I haven’t actually noticed any practical difference in my phone experience. Everything seems just as snappy, and even the odd mobile game plays just fine unless it’s an old AAA console port .

Screensaver Factory, Create stunning professional screensavers within minutes. Create screensavers for yourself, for marketing or unlimited royalty-free commercial distribution. Make screensavers from images, video and swf flash, add background music and smooth sprite and transition effects. Screensaver Factory is very easy to use, and it enables you to make self-installing screensaver files and CDs for easy setup and distribution. Screensaver Factory is the most advanced software of its kind.

Battery Life Matters More

My phone has a pretty decent battery life, but I had become annoyed on some days that my phone’s battery was in the red by 8PM if I’d used it quite a lot that day. Overall, I don’t want to think about battery percentages during the course of my day. I want to put my phone on its wireless charger when I go to bed, and take it off when I wake up. I don’t have time for battery anxiety while I’m awake, and after turning on the battery-saving features, I now usually have 30% left at the very least when I go to bed. That’s a better quality of life improvement than you’d expect, and one less thing to worry about.

I’ve Left Some Features On

I haven’t turned on the most aggressive battery-saving features. Mainly, I’ve only underclocked the CPU by 30% and decreased the brightness of the screen by 10%. The OLED on my phone was already plenty bright, so I haven’t noticed that small sacrifice. I’ve also disabled 5G entirely on my phone, not because of some wacky 5G myths , but because it’s a power hog and I rarely if ever need my phone’s connection to be that fast. 4G speeds are also overkill for watching some YouTube and doom-scrolling through X.

The other feature I can’t live without is the always-on screen, since I don’t wear a smartwatch anymore, it’s nice to glance over and see the date and time when I need it. So, in principle, I could squeeze even more battery life from my phone if I needed it.

Greeting Card Builder

Battery Limits and Lower Resolution Are a Great Combo Too

My S22 Ultra supports a charge limit of 85%, where the phone will stop charging beyond that level. This prolongs battery life significantly and cancels out the negative effects of leaving your phone to charge overnight, since it’s not constantly pushing against that 100% limit. However, that does mean sacrificing 15% of your battery life, but by combining it with battery saving, I’ll likely extend the life of my phone’s battery by years.

The S22 Ultra also has a spectacular 1440p screen, and for a long time I was hellbent on enjoying every pixel I paid for. However, over time, I realized that I could not tell the difference between the phone running at its native resolution versus running at 1080p, which meant I was burning processing power for almost no benefit. Even at 1080p scaled to 1440p, you still benefit from not seeing the pixel grid itself, but the actual image is a little fuzzier. It’s just that you’d have to put them side-by-side to even tell.

VSDC Pro Video Editor is a light professional non-linear video editing suite for creating a movie of any complexity. It supports the most popular video/audio formats and codecs, including 4K, HD and GoPro videos. Preconfigured profiles make the creation of videos for various multimedia and mobile devices absolutely hassle-free.

Key features:

• Import from any devices and cams, including GoPro and drones. All formats supported. Сurrently the only free video editor that allows users to export in a new H265/HEVC codec, something essential for those working with 4K and HD.
• Everything for hassle-free basic editing: cut, crop and merge files, add titles and favorite music
• Visual effects, advanced color correction and trendy Instagram-like filters
• All multimedia processing done from one app: video editing capabilities reinforced by a video converter, a screen capture, a video capture, a disc burner and a YouTube uploader
• Non-linear editing: edit several files with simultaneously
• Easy export to social networks: special profiles for YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter and Instagram
• High quality export – no conversion quality loss, double export speed even of HD files due to hardware acceleration
• Stabilization tool will turn shaky or jittery footage into a more stable video automatically.
• Essential toolset for professional video editing: blending modes, Mask tool, advanced multiple-color Chroma Key

Full Performance Is a Toggle Away

The best part of all, is that I can get my phone’s full-fat performance back with just a swipe and a tap, no more complex than turning on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Since the battery saver toggle is in the app shade, it’s no issue to revert to normal performance for specific apps.

Overall, I think I’m going to keep using the power saving mode, and consider its standard mode more like the “sports” mode on a supercar. You only need to flip that toggle on track days, you don’t need it to drive down to the grocery store.