Having battery drain issue on your Samsung Galaxy S20, S20+ or S20 Ultra? The Samsung Galaxy S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra include a huge 120Hz display, 8K videos and 5G support among others. Due to its powerful specs, you might notice your phone’s battery draining a little too fast, but there are ways to slow it down.
This guide will help you with some useful tips to improve battery life on your Galaxy S20, S20+ or S20 Ultra. Read on.
How to improve battery life on Samsung Galaxy S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra
Below are some tips to help you maximize the battery life on your Galaxy S20, S20+ or S20 Ultra.
1. Check on apps using too much battery
If you notice the battery is draining way too fast, it may be due to some apps using way too much battery. Open battery usage dashboard and check how much battery is being used by each app and limit the usage accordingly. Here’s how to check battery usage on your galaxy phone.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Battery and device care
- Tap on Battery
- Next tap on Battery usage graph
This will show you a detailed list of apps and their battery usage. If you notice anything abnormal in the battery usage, tap on the specific app to limit their background usage.
2. Uninstall or put unused apps to sleep
Check for apps that you don’t use much and put them to sleep or remove them completely. These apps not only utilize system resources but also drain battery by running in the background.
Here’s how to put unused apps to sleep.
- Go to Settings
- Tap on Battery and device care
- Tap on Battery
- Tap on Background usage limits
- Toggle Put unused apps to sleep to On
3. Disable Always-on display
The Always-on display keeps your phone display on at all times and can immediately drain your battery. We recommend you to turn this feature off if you want your battery to last long.
Here’s how to disable Always-on display.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Lock screen
- Tap Always on Display and set it to OFF
If you still want to enjoy this feature but at the same time save on battery, you can use “Tap to show” option to show AOD only when you tap on the screen. You can also schedule the AOD to show up only at specific time.
4. Use 60Hz refresh rate instead of 120Hz
The Galaxy S20 series include a huge 120Hz display that can have huge overhead on the battery. We recommend you to use 60Hz which is sufficient for most users and won’t have any noticeable difference between the two.
If you want to scale down the refresh rate from 120Hz to 60Hz, here’s how to do it.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Tap on Motion smoothness
- Choose Standard refresh rate (60Hz) and click Apply to confirm the change
5. Enable power saving mode
Although you will lose on some functionality, enabling battery saving mode can drastically slow down the battery drain on your phone. The are two power saving modes that you can use. The default mode Optimize provides a balance mix of performance and battery life. If you need more battery saving, you can choose between Medium power saving and Maximum power saving modes. Here’s how to do that.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Battery and device care
- Tap on Battery
- Tap on Power saving mode and toggle it On
We also recommend turning on Adaptive battery to limit battery usage for apps that you don’t used often.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Battery and device care
- Tap on Battery
- Scroll down and tap on More battery settings
- Tap on Adaptive battery and turn it On
6. Disable features you don’t need
Features like Edge Panel, Edge Lighting, Motion gestures, Video enhancer, Smart stay, Smart alert, Easy mute, Palm swipe to capture, etc are rarely used by most users and we recommend you to just turn them off completely to save on battery. Below are steps to disable some of these features.
Here’s how to disable Edge panels and Edge lighting:
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Scroll down and tap on Edge screen
- Tap on Edge panels and toggle it OFF
- Then tap on Edge lighting and toggle it OFF
Here’s how to disable Motion gesture features:
- Open Settings
- Tap on Advanced features
- Tap on Motions and gestures
- Select the features you don’t use and turn them off
7. Scale down brightness level
You can improve battery life to a certain extend just by keeping the screen brightness level low. The higher the brightness level the higher is the power consumption. You can change brightness level by following the steps below.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Change the brightness level on the Brightness scale
We also recommend to disable Adaptive brightness as it will automatically change the brightness level depending on the current lighting condition. For instance, if you go out into the bright sun, your screen will automatically become brighter and this will result in further battery drain. If you want to disable Adaptive brightness, here’s how to do that.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Toggle the Adaptive brightness to OFF
8. Adjust screen resolution
The WQHD+ resolution of 3200×1440 pixels on Galaxy S20 series is great but it can also drain battery fast. We recommend reducing the resolution to HD+ (1600×720) or FHD+ (2400×1080) to extend battery life. Here’s how to change the screen resolution.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Tap on Screen resolution
- Select and set HD+ or FHD+ either of which is good enough for most users
9. Enable Dark Mode
We recommend dark mode over the light mode. The dark mode not only uses less power but is also less straining on the eye. Here’s how to enable dark mode on your Galaxy 20.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Display
- Select Dark at the top
If you want to use dark mode only at night, or during specific time, you can head over to Dark mode settings and adjust the settings accordingly. You can also toggle dark mode on and off in the quick-settings panel.
10. Disable WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and NFC when not in use
We recommend to keep your WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth off when you are not actively using them to save battery life. These services will keep scanning for connections and that can drain your battery fast. Also, if you use GPS services like Google Maps, there are other ways to locate your location without using the GPS chip. Here’s how to use other locating method for location tracking that will save battery life.
- Open Settings
- Tap on Location
- Tap on Locating method
- Select and set Battery Saving as the locating method. When you use Battery saving mode, it disables GPS chip and uses WiFi and mobile networks to detect your location.