How to increase battery life of Samsung Galaxy S2

The Samsung Galaxy S2 has been one of the best phones in recent time. With amazing hardware it give good performance but when it comes to battery like the device suffers. It has a 1650mAh battery but that is countered by its Super Amoled screen that sucks a lot of battery. There are many tweaks that can be performed to increase the battery like. The basic steps can be done without rooting the phone. A rooted phone though can get much better battery life.

Basic steps to increase the battery life of Samsung Galaxy S2

Widgets – Yes the Galaxy S2 handles them seamlessly but they also eat up battery. Turn off unneeded widgets or use battery friendly ones

Screen Brightness – The Super AMOLED screen is a huge battery sucker ! Turn of automatic screen brightness and reduce the brightness to a lower amount. Also reduce screen timeout.

Connectivity – Use 3G or Wifi connections when available. GPRS / Edge uses a lot of battery compared to the other two. Apps like Juice Defender sometimes cause a lot of overhead. Test it to see if it actually saves any battery for you. I prefer not to use these apps to control connectivity.

Find out what is using the battery on your Samsung Galaxy S2

A paid app called BetterBatteryStats can help you here. It shows you what programs have been using the battery. If there are any wakelocks that is preventing the system from going into Deep Sleep mode. It can help you detect the rogue apps that are running on your system. With the information gathered with this app, you can eliminate applications that use the battery unnecessarily.

Another cause of battery draining is CPU usage. The Samsung Galaxy S2 has dual core 1200Mhz CPU. It does not have to run at full clock speeds all the time, doing so will severely reduce the battery life of your device.

You can check the CPU states of your device by installed the free app CPUSpy. This app enabled you to see what clock speed has been running at. The stock Galaxy S2 usually runs at 200Mhz and then at 1200Mhz, leaving the clock speed in between unused most of the time. This is a waste of battery, to change this behavior we need to install a different kernel and that is only possible with rooted android phones. If you have a rooted phone and you are prepared to root your phone read on.

Improving the Battery Life of Samsung Galaxy S2 on rooted phones

This is where we can improve the battery life exponentially. First of all you need to have a rooted phone. If your phone is unrooted, then follow this guide to root the SGS2. Once the phone is rooted you can change the kernel that is running on your phone.

To learn about kernels you can visit the Kernel Governors thread .

Now lets flash a new kernel to your phone. We will use the Siyah Kernel, since this is optimized for the Galaxy S2 with different governors. Installing the kernel is easy if you rooted your phone earlier. Use Odin on your computer, connect your phone, click PDA in Odin and choose the kernel file to flash.

Install a CPU speed contol app like No-frills CPU so that we can change the governors running on your phone. Leave Max clock at 1200, min at 200 and governor can be changed to either lulzactive or smartassV2. Set I/O to the improved SIO and you are all set.

Prepare to be amazed at the battery life your device gives you ! This is because the lulzactive governor increases the CPU clock speed upwards only when needed saving battery. To further save battery you can flash Cyanogenmod or the popular MIUI for even more awesomeness. You can find guides for that at the Galaxy S2 FAQ page.

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