On Sat, 01 Feb 2014 11:16:06 +0000, Chris Uppal wrote:

maybe the reason why your phone discharges faster when ~17%
full is that below that limit it is firing
up bluetooth to warn you that power is low.

I guess if I had a better understanding of how the GPS and
bluetooth consumed power, I'd be better off.

One thing about the bluetooth, since I have a bluetooth speaker
in the vehicle, it's always "talking" to the bluetooth for
phone calls and for GPS - although I don't know how much the
bluetooth needs to 'fire up' to say "GPS signal lost" and
"GPS signal reacquired'.

One thing that 'seems' to have made a difference in the
ensuing days is that I've installed a plethora of battery
monitor freeware on the S3.

A bunch of them were garbage, so I deleted them soon after
first using them, but, the ones still on my phone a

a. Battery Doctor
b. Battery Monitor Widget
c. Elixr & Elixr2

And, in a different category:
a. Wakelock Detector (uZumm Apps)

I'm not sure what combination of things made the problem less
severe, but, using these programs, I was able to find the high
draining ones, and I uninstalled most of the culprits, I think.

I do like how, for example, Battery Doctor, kills twenty running
apps at a time, all of which I hadn't even realized were running.

For example, unbeknownst to me, the Chinese mapping program,
ZNavi, was apparently using the GPS all the time, even when GPS
was turned off on the phone. So I uninstalled it, and a few
other programs that kept waking up the phone, or running in
the background.

So, now I have the operating system being the main consumer
of power at 75% with all other programs only consuming in the
single digits of battery percentage.

I need to test on the road, but, I am hopeful that this
"optimization" (which had yielded surprising results)
will help somewhat.