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So, you picked up the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and found that the battery life isn’t quite up to par. Well, the good news is, there are quite a few things you can do to improve the battery life. The majority of the tips we will be providing in this tutorial do not affect the usage of your phone. We aren’t talking about turning off background data, or making the screen black and white. These are useful tips that won’t change how you use your phone.
Here’s how you can improve your Galaxy Z Fold 6 battery life.
Switch to “Light” mode
The Galaxy Z Fold 6 (and many other newer Samsung phones) offer a couple of options for the Performance Profile. It defaults to Standard, but you can switch over to the “Light” mode. Samsung describes this mode “prioritizes battery life and cooling efficiency over processing speed”. And given the huge vapor chamber inside the Galaxy Z Fold 6, this can be very useful.
If you’re worried about this mode making your phone slower, don’t. I’ve been using this mode for the past two weeks and haven’t noticed a different in performance. I’ve even run some benchmarks, including Geekbench 6 to see the raw performance difference. And surprisingly, the single-core score was higher, and so was the multi-core. However, the GPU was lower by about 18%. So the only place you’ll probably notice the difference is in graphic-intensive games like Genshin Impact. But this setting doesn’t apply to games, so that’s not even an issue.
With this mode enabled, I’ve noticed a nice gain in battery life. Instead of ending the day around 10%, I typically end the day around 20%-25%.
How to: Settings > Device Care > Performance Profile > Light.
Adjust Display brightness and resolution
Another way to improve your battery life is by adjusting some Display settings. First, you can change the brightness level to a lower setting, or turn off adaptive brightness. While adaptive brightness doesn’t have a huge impact on battery life, it can sometimes make the screen brighter than needed.
How to: Settings > Display > Brightness
You can also adjust the refresh rate. By default, both displays on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 refresh at 120Hz. However, these are LTPO displays, meaning that they can adaptively change their refresh rate from 1Hz to 120Hz. This does make a difference in terms of battery life, as you don’t need 120Hz for the camera or watching a YouTube video. By default this is set to “Adaptive”, but to conserve more battery, you can switch to “Standard” which will set it to 60Hz all the time. This is a minor change, but it can net you up to an additional hour of screen time.
How to: Settings > Display > Motion Smoothness
Finally, when talking about the display, another way to improve battery life is by turning off the Always On Display. As you can imagine, this does take up a decent amount of battery. However, if you want to keep the AOD on, you can also adjust the settings. You can choose to have it show when you tap the display instead of all the time, or you can turn it off entirely.
How to: Settings > Lock Screen > Always On Display
Make sure you’re running the latest software
Finally, make sure to check that you are running the latest update from Samsung. Most of the time, updates will improve battery life, as things get optimized, and features improve over time. Sometimes it can affect battery life negatively, however that is pretty rare.
How to: Settings > Software Update > Download and Install
Restrict battery usage for some apps
Now, we’re getting into the changes that can affect how you use your phone. The first thing you can do is Restrict the battery usage for some apps. If you change from “Optimized” to “Restricted” you will keep the app from running in the background. This is recommended for some apps that are really not well optimized, and can use a lot of battery. Like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The downside to doing this, you might not get notifications in real-time.
How to: Settings > App > [App Name] > Battery
Use Power Saving Mode
Samsung, like most smartphone makers, has a power saving mode. When enabled, this will turn off the Always on Display, limit the CPU speed to 70%, decrease the brightness by 10%, and also limit apps and the home screen. These can all be toggled on or off, depending on what you want. The last option to limit apps makes the most significant difference in how long your phone can last in Power Saving Mode. It can add another day to the projected battery life. I wouldn’t recommend using this all the time, but if you are running low and won’t be able to charge for a little while, it’s good to enable.
How to: Settings > Battery > Power Saving