What does Battery Saver Mode "Extended" actually change?

[BasicallyCP]

The battery saver mode page allows for tweaking four settings:

1. Max brightness
2. Always-on-display
3. Disable vibration
4. Restrict background data

Now, if you disable(!) all of those you still receive minor savings, at least from what the prediction overview (listing all available battery modes) shows. First question: What remains "tweaked" internally to allow for that?

Furthermore, from enabling the items one by one, adjusting max brightness offers a large impact on the predicted runtime. That's no surprise. However, I would have thought that disabling the always-on-display leads to more savings but, looking at the predicted time, it actually doesn't. The impact is close to zero.

Vibration has a minor impact, more than AOD, while a HUGE gain of additional standby hours can be achieved by selecting the "Restrict background data" option. I wonder how that turns out in the everyday use but I think that, if one app would suffer, I would just exclude it and leave the rest in the "saving" position.

Concerning the (assumed) internal changes, I've logged the CPU frequency for a while with the extended battery mode on and off and can't see that throttling is active like I saw with other phones and their battery saver modes, so that's a nice trait. The chipset still clocks to max when needed, same as with the extended mode off.

How are your experiences with that mode? Does it offer more runtime (namely: are the predictions somehow in line with reality?) or is it leading to added lag or other problems? Currently, it seems like taking a lock at that background data option is worth a shot.

 

[hungryfortech]

The battery saver mode page allows for tweaking four settings:

1. Max brightness
2. Always-on-display
3. Disable vibration
4. Restrict background data

Now, if you disable(!) all of those you still receive minor savings, at least from what the prediction overview (listing all available battery modes) shows. First question: What remains "tweaked" internally to allow for that?

Furthermore, from enabling the items one by one, adjusting max brightness offers a large impact on the predicted runtime. That's no surprise. However, I would have thought that disabling the always-on-display leads to more savings but, looking at the predicted time, it actually doesn't. The impact is close to zero.

Vibration has a minor impact, more than AOD, while a HUGE gain of additional standby hours can be achieved by selecting the "Restrict background data" option. I wonder how that turns out in the everyday use but I think that, if one app would suffer, I would just exclude it and leave the rest in the "saving" position.

Concerning the (assumed) internal changes, I've logged the CPU frequency for a while with the extended battery mode on and off and can't see that throttling is active like I saw with other phones and their battery saver modes, so that's a nice trait. The chipset still clocks to max when needed, same as with the extended mode off.

How are your experiences with that mode? Does it offer more runtime (namely: are the predictions somehow in line with reality?) or is it leading to added lag or other problems? Currently, it seems like taking a lock at that background data option is worth a shot.

Only thing I've noticed is when I have my phone set to Extended and I've set Max Brightness to 80%. However, I've seen my Brightness go over 80% on Auto especially when I was outdoors (saw it hit 100% and Boosted). Under Manual Brightness, I can have it go to 100% too. So that 80% is misleading?

 

[BasicallyCP]

Good find. I was wondering too since the prediction page instantly applies a gain in standby hours (and a significant one at that) by just enabling the "max brightness" feature. Since it can not know when or for how long the display will be on and what range the "auto" feature will use in a given situation, it seems like a very optimistic value, especially if you just use a limit of 95% for example.

But regarding your question, it's indeed strange to see "auto" exceeding the max brightness limit. I mean, the limit is there for the auto mode only. Might be a bug, unless we struggle to see the logic behind acting like that.

Personally, I would leave max brightness alone since it's more useful to have the display ramp up to max in order to actually see something when needed. If "auto" generally sets up the display as being too bright, one can still adjust the slider (even in auto mode) to tune the point of optimal brightness. I think it acts as an offset to the actual (internal) value the automatic comes up with. At least, that's how I perceived the feature on this and other phones so far.