How to get the most from the Samsung Galaxy S2 Battery

 We all know that the big problem with smartphones is the battery life. The fact of the matter is that we will almost certainly see ourselves needing to charge the battery on an almost nightly schedule. This however doesn't stop us from wanting to prolong the battery life. This little entry is going to look at how to prolong the life of a Samsung Galaxy S2, though the tricks and tips mentioned here can really be translated almost any phone on the market.

Firstly we'll go a screen that will be our immediate friend, the Power saving mode screen. To access this screen to the right you need to open up the settings (press the menu button then settings) and scroll down to the "Power saving mode" menu which should be the fifth option down.


The first thing you want to do when you get to this menu is to press in the little box that allows you to enable "Power saving mode". This setting allows you to use all those other options that are below such as turning off things like GPS, Wi-Fi and Sync. The big one perhaps though is turning down the brightness of the screen to just 10%, especially if your indoors as this will save a lot of the life of the battery if your still using it. I would advise, if you're not using anything on the phone, to tick all the boxes and lower the brightness to 10%.

Further down the Power saving mode menu you will find a "Power saving tips" screen (that looks like the one to the right). This basically covers what I've already said though it misses a few other tricks you can use to prolong the battery in other ways.

First for your background try to use a stationary one (so not fishes swimming or fireworks) as an animated background uses up battery quicker than a still image. Another trick is to turn the sound off on the phone. This is a brilliant trick if you receive a number of texts and your phone is always buzzing. Although it can be an inconvenience each one of those noises takes a small portion from the battery.


Although we may not like to do this next thing we may need to. Put the phone down. Yes, I know that's hard but just hear me out. Every input the phone gets and every time the screen lights up, vibrates, or makes a sound drains the battery. If we are trying to preserve the battery only use it for the most necessary of things. Don't sit there taking photographs with the flash on or playing "The King of OX" as both with eat into the battery. In fact the fewer applications you can have running the better.

The final tip is to check your battery usage. To do this you need to open up the "Settings" then scroll down to "About phone" and click "Battery usage". You'll then see a screen similar to the one below which allows you to see what exactly is eating up your battery all the time. This is where you can start to make personalised changes. For example make fewer calls, or close certain programs (Opera was responsible for 2% of my battery usage and has been closed due to it). By looking at this screen and the Energy saving mode you can work towards getting as much from the Samsung Galaxy S2 battery as possible.

How to get the most from the Samsung Galaxy S2 Camera

With an 8MP auto focus still camera and an 1080p HD video camera on the phone (as well as a 2MP front facing camera for video calls) you may be astounded by just the raw numbers.So lets look at just how you can get the best pictures from the phone.

Although I'm no where near a professional photographer I'll just be giving you the quick tips to improve your photographs. These, on the whole, come from just tinkering with the phones inbuilt settings which can be found by pressing the "cog" icon on the phones "camera" screen.

The first setting you come across that you will want to learn about is is the "Scene mode". This allows you to set the phones settings to several default modes that help take pictures based on the surroundings. If you look at the image to the right you can see some of the "Scenes", and they are all suited to certain photographs. For example taking a picture of a persons face is best taken in the "Portrait" scene whilst a "Night" shot is taken in the dark and is a slower picture that can take a few seconds to take (but is extremely good quality as long as you don't shake the phone).

One of the absolute major settings is the "Resolution" setting. The best on the phone is the 8MP setting which has a resolution of 3264 x 2448 (and is the top one on the list you can see to the side) whilst the 0.3MP (640 x 480) is the lowest quality. For the best images take them on 8MP as they do look, a lot better than with the other settings.


 Another setting you will find yourself using an awful lot is the "White balance" setting. This is basically the setting for the type of lighting conditions you are in. The selection of the right setting here can turn a very good photo into an excellent one and is worth setting correctly every time.


The last key setting you will find yourself wanting to check is the "Image quality" setting. This, alongside "resolution", are arguably the two that make the biggest difference when taking images in good lighting conditions. A "Normal" image can show jagged edges at times especially when taking images that have smooth circular edges on them, "Superfine" however makes the edges of items look really well defined and is an essential setting.

As well as those mentioned above things likes "Flash", "Exposure value", "Focus mode" and a number of other settings are there for more experienced photographers to play with.

Deleting pictures from the Samsung Galaxy S2 (the Gallery method)

So we've got a new Samsung Galaxy S2 and used the camera to take a few shots with the brilliant 8MP camera....except they're just not very good pictures and now we're looking through them we actually don't want to keep them. We sit there for a second or two and ask ourselves how we go about deleting them. As with most things with modern day phones there is always more than 1 method but lets just look at the most simple method.

Firstly go to the Gallery app and then click on the “Camera” option. From here we can see all the photographs on the phone and we can easily find which picture or pictures we want to delete. From the gallery mode you should press the either the menu button or hold on one of the image. After doing one of those you will see a small set of options appear at the bottom of the the screen including “Share via”, “Delete” and “More”. What you need to do is select the photographs you want to delete (placing a green tick in the corner of them) then press on delete.

After pressing delete you will be asked to confirm your choice, click on “Confirm deletions” and the selected photographs will be deleted from the handset.

Of course there is other options to delete the images using things like Kies or windows explorer (and a computer/laptop) as well as deleting directly from the Camera app (if we decide the picture needs deleting immediately) though for most occasions using the gallery app is the best, the quickest and the easiest. 

 This picture shows the menus that we see on the Gallery screen, press on the images to select them

 In this picture you can see the confirmation prompt, to delete it you need to "Confirm deletion".