Bright idea

The screen is one of the biggest power hogs on any smartphone, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the brightness of your Note II’s impressive 5.5-inch display.

Luckily, Samsung has made it really easy to keep tabs on screen brightness, with a handy settings bar in the pull-down notifications menu.

From here you can manually set the brightness level, or select the auto function – which automatically adjusts the brightness according to your environment.

To get the most out of the Note II’s battery, set the screen brightness to the lowest level at which you can still comfortably read the display.

Put that light out!

The Note II allows you to set how long it takes for the screen to switch off when you have finished using it.

To maximise the battery life, you can set this to a shorter amount of time – but if you want to work more slowly without the screen going blank, it’s also easy to adjust to a longer timeout.

To make a change, go to Settings > Display > Screen timeout.

Put a cap on your apps

Unlike other smartphones that limit you to one task at once, the GALAXY Note II lets you run multiple apps at once. So once you’ve finished using an app, make sure you close it down, rather than leaving it to run in the background, where it will continue to make demands on the battery.

To see what apps you have running at any time, hold down the home button to bring up the Android multi-tasking menu, then swipe across any app in the list to close it down with no fuss.

Draining in the sync

You can run all your online accounts on your GALAXY Note II, from Google and ChatON to Facebook and Twitter – but getting it to check them all every five minutes can be very battery intensive.

Head over to Settings and scroll down to accounts to see all your accounts and adjust how often each one syncs with the phone.

Setting longer intervals between updates will save you power, while turning automatic syncing off altogether will make the phone go even further by only checking for new updates when you fire up the associated app.

With great power… 

For a real battery boost, switch your Note II to power saving mode whenever you don’t need it at peak performance.

This allows you to eke out more battery life by limiting the performance of some or all of the most demanding features, including the quad-core processor, the display, the background colour scheme and haptic (key vibration) feedback.

You can adjust the options in Settings > Power saving mode, or quickly switch power saving on or off using the toggle in the pull-down bar.

Can your connectivity

It’s easy to toggle key features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and Mobile Data on and off via the notification bar on the GALAXY Note II. Be sure to turn off any you aren’t using to get a little extra battery life, then simply switch them back on as and when you need them.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is another great feature you’ll want to explore – but when you aren’t using it, this can also be turned off by going to Settings > More settings.