I disagree about the widgets part.
Sure, putting them for the looks (e.g. putting a huge clock widget when your lock screen and status bar already show that info) might be useless and redundant, as you say.
But other widgets (e.g.quick notes, schedule widgets, maybe even a news widget that syncs once a day) are perfectly understandable, especially for some home configurations that prefer simplicity.

As an example, I'll give my home screen: it consists of three pages, one of them is empty, the other two contain three widgets: notes, schedule and news (syncs once a day automatically). The dock contains 5 items, each of them has one or two gestures assigned. The dock's middle icon opens the app drawer, divided into several tabs.
In order to open each of these widgets' apps' screens that interest me, it would take me between two and four clicks and one or two swipes to get there.
Considering I use them regularly (the notes and schedule widgets, a few times times a day [3-5 each] and the news widget, once or twice), it would be way faster and more efficient to have the widgets instead of removing them or replacing them with icons (should I do that, it will still take me one to three clicks to get where I want, plus the loading time).

Plus what Tomaxda said about widgets.


Also, I'd suggest adding Tasker to your list of apps. It's not for the lazy people, but I can get it to do all of what the apps you listed do.


Sorry for the block of text. Great guide.

Thanks for the tips!. I guess juicedefender is effecti\ve then.

I dont know if it's just me but the S3's (stock) TouchWiz Task Mgr seems hmm.. not as efficient as it's predecessors, in governing it's processes and regularly dumping/cycling idle processes as needed...?

just wanted to share my personal setting....
my battery life has greatly improved just by (in settings->dev. options) limiting background processes to 4 and setting 1) window 2) transition 3) animator scales all to 0.5x.

hope it helps you too

Originally Posted by ngocdao

Thanks for the tips!. I guess juicedefender is effecti\ve then.

I personally uninstalled it after a while and noticed no big difference.

Informative Post Thanks for sharing
I installed juice defender and cachemate ...lets see how it goes

Hey Woodrube!
Congrats on the writeup!

http://www.xda-developers.com/androi...-galaxy-s-iii/

Great Job!! :thumbup::thumbup:

Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda app-developers app

What to say about this?

---

i've managed to get 2 days in battery...
Rom: X_Power

On the Governor part.. how come I'm not seeing some explanations on "Pegasusq"?

Originally Posted by letters_to_cleo

On the Governor part.. how come I'm not seeing some explanations on "Pegasusq"?

Ummm. Because he linked to it...

Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda app-developers app

Excellent list, but I would definitely do a section on custom brightness settings for those of us on a CM10 based ROM.

I can post my settings for comparison;



Here is a screenshot of my battery life right now, I charged it midday because I didn't get to last night but this is really heavy usage with GPS on 100% of the time.




You will also need to adjust the other settings like window length, reset threshold, etc.

Originally Posted by Woodrube

Proof that these things work. Stock battery by the way. Sorry for the huge pix. I'll tag them with a Hide Parse for better viewing real estate.

 

Change Log:
11/2/12 - Initial Post


***********
If anyone has any tips or tricks that they want to share, by all means post them in here and I will link it in the OP. We are all in this together.

@woodrube
Thank you for your great post. Quite some useful tips.
I'm impressed by you battery usage graphs, especially the fact that you managed to have your screen on for over 6h...(I'm more like 4h30-5h00). However, I wonder if you could not improve your battery life even further as I notice your phone it's often awake while screen off during the night. Also do you need phone/data connexion during the night? I personally set my phone to airplane mode during the night (JD or some free apps can do this automatically for you and it won't prevent the alarm clock to ring in the morning).

As to JuiceDefender, I now have great doubts (still unresolved) about this app.
I've been using JD on all my phones for over 2 years in expert mode exactly as you recommend. But since moving to a SGS3 I'm not so convinced that it is so useful at least with this phone. I noticed there was an issue with JD when realising thanks to BetterBatterystats that JD kept awaking the phone while screen off even during the night when my phone was supposed to be deep asleep in airplane mode....
I've now tested using my phone without JD.... I manually set Wi-Fi on/off when I go home/leave home. Since I stopped using JD, my battery holds much better during the night than before...I don't know if it's me poorly configuring JD or if it is specific to JD+SGS3... I still need to investigate.

A trick I now use to save battery is that I've set my phone to 2G only which uses much less battery than 3G and is enough for background sync of emails, news, social media, and also enough for audio streaming. When I really need heavy data usage and I'm not in a Wi-Fi zone then I manually switch to 3G.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app