Samsung Galaxy S4 and the battery life....

[Downunder35m]

Even before I got my I9505 it was pretty clear it won't be able to reach the battery times of my old Nokia.
A full HD screen and more than a hand full of CPU's eat away a lot of juice....
But after the initial charge and set up I was pretty disappointed to see that downloading a few updates, games and maps already drained the system by over 20%,
bit further down the track (after testing a few games and 3 or 4 Youtube vids) and I was down to just 50% of battery power.
Being lazy I just put the phone on standby and left it for the night (was around 6PM).
Next morning the battery was down to 10% although the phone has been sitting with a black screen on the table....
That problem got me thinking that there must be more to the battery usage than CPU and big, bright screen....
So I fully charged the S$ and simply left it on standby after that - just over 24 hours until the battery was due for a charge again - IMHO that is either exxessive or a faulty battery...
While on charge again I started to do some digging in the setup and the battery monitor - although only used for a few minutes, the screen still showed up (during the standby time) as a main enery eater !!??
Ok, but I could also see that a lot of system processes used quite a bit of the juice.
Before I continue to explain what I all did to get more standby time out of my phone: I'm not a user that needs the mobile data as I prefer my Wifi at home for that!

You might have bought your S4 just to show off, because you got it on your new contract or simply because you wanted it - but you did not buy it to constantly charge it or carry spare batteries with you?
The thing is heavy loaded with gadgets and features that most other Android phones never even heard of, and most them are active by default....
All those nice sensors checking your gestures, tracking your face and even to automatically zoom into webpages want some battery juice too, so I disabled all of them.
Same for WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC and other connection stuff, I only turn them on when I need them.
Now I was more or less back to a standard phone with no active gadgets that I don't use most of the time anyway.
Still the battery life on standby only bare improved, but while using the phone I could already notice a longer battery life.
Checked everything again and again but apart from the position and location system I could not find anything - and the position stuff only becomes active when used, on top only GPS was activated for it and Google services not allowed to get my location anyway.
The thing that finally got me on the right track had nothing to do with the task at hand at all!
Needed some downtime so I started a movie on my PC, phone on the desk...
Every few minutes I got these weird noises in the speaker (on my PC ) when the phone checked something for the mobile network.
As I noticed these sunds before with my other phones I immediately knew something was different on the S4!
Mind you in the meantime I also activated the power saving functions to no real advantage.
All my other phones made these sounds about 3 to 5 times an hour and only for very short data bursts",
the S4 however caused these sounds about 4 times in 10 minutes on average!
Ok, where to find the energy saving settings for the mobile networks? Righ there are none!!!
But I did find the settings that define what type of network is used!
By default the S4 will check for supported networks and use the fasted or the one with the best signal.
As I only have a simple GSM connection with no data plan I switched from "all" to just "GSM only".
What can I say? After having the phone for a few hours next to speakers I only got the "connection souds" once...
Stand-by-only now works for a bit over 2 days instead of barely a full day.

If you need longer usage times for your phones, check that disable everything you don't need - especially when it comes to your mobile network.
In my personal example there is no data included in the plan and therefor only the normal GSM standard is needed, no UMTS, LTE or whatever.
Disabling those not only turns the scan for those networks off but also the corresponding modules on the phone itself.
Similar to the provider settings: If you don't use roaming and your plan does not allow for the use of other networks - turn them off and manually set the provider in the phone settings.
That means your phone will no longer try to connect to other networks that have a better signal than your provider and save quite a lot of energy.
And, honestly, if you don't use air tasks, air gestures or face tracking, why would you need their services running all the time?
A simply click in the quick menu will activate them if you want to impress friends

[viewer]

Interesting, and probably applies to most mobiles I suppose?

[Downunder35m]

IMHO yes, it does.
I never felt the need to have the internet and my Emails in my pocket, so turning off unused features helped with previous phones already.
But I must say: the more gadgets there are, the shorter the battery life in general.
And to be honest most people would not even use the face tracking and gesture features on their new toys.
Noone has to loose anything by disabling fetures and functions that are not in use.
Can only recommend to try it out under your real life conditions and make your own comparison in terms of battery life.
Have not used the phone much now for almost 48 hours and still have over 40$ juice left - enough for me to turn stuff of that I don't need - especially mobile networks