Coffee Induced Games

Smart phone’s are great aren’t they? I mean you hardly even need a laptop when you’ve got one of these babies. Only one small problem, they have terrible battery life. You’re lucky to get through a working day in some cases. this is what I found when I first got my Galaxy S2 phone.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a brilliant phone, easily better than any other phone I’ve tried. the screen is gorgeous, it’s fast and responsive and I can tweak anything I like. So I thought “why not try tweaking the battery life?”

Here’s the steps I’ve taken to tweak things:

• Rooted the phone – Follow this guide: http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/how-to-root-your-samsung-galaxy-s2-50004972/
• Frozen all the pre-installed Samsung software that I don’t use. – I used Bloat Freezer, but that’s not on the market anymore, I know Titanium Back up will freeze stuff but this costs more.
• Used SetCPU to keep the CPU between 200 and 500 mhz – https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mhuang.overclocking&hl=en
• Used “Screen filter” to half the brightness of the screen for indoor use – https://market.android.com/details?id=com.haxor&hl=en
• Installed the latest “speedmod” kernel – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1182498
• Install ATK to aggressively kill processes when locking the phone – https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller&hl=en
• Set the screen timeout to 15 seconds (Settings/display/Screen timeout)
• Turned off Auto sync for all apps (Settings / Accounts and sync / Auto-sync)
• Turn off background data (Settings / Accounts and sync / Background data)
• Set the phone to 2G “GSM” only unless I need 3G (Settings / Wireless and networks / GSM only (This can vary))
• Set the default launcher to “Zeam Launcher” – https://market.android.com/details?id=org.zeam&hl=en

And that’s about it, if I hardly use the phone, I will now get nearly 4 days use. In general it will use less than 1% battery per hour when not in use.

I have just order a replacement battery, the standard battery is 1650mah, my new replacement battery is 2450mah and cost about £10 ($15) on Ebay.Batteries take a few charge cycles to settle in, so I’ll update the post when I’ve tested it properly.

there are a few things I wish I could do that would help greatly with the battery, just don’t know how to do them:

• Be able to only use half the screen for simple tasks like reading texts or browing music tracks (the screen’s easily big enough).
• Have a solar panel on the back of the phone. You could then trickle charge it over the day if you sit next to a window (which I do).
• Any other ideas???