It takes no scientist to realize that four CPU cores and a screen this large consume extreme amounts of energy when used all together .
There are however some interesting different usage scenarios .
First of all , if you come from another phone which also had an AMOLED screen , there is almost no annoyance from the fact that in Galaxy S 3 , the auto brightness setting makes the screen dim in most cases .
In a case like that , using the automatic brightness ettings really extends your battery life , up to 30% compared to using it at the maximum setting .
Another interesting fact is the power saving mode . The way it works is by decreasing the CPU's performance , doing it however without either using less cores nor by lowering it's speed which makes it even more interesting . In most cases it just refuses to clock up to maximum speed just to offer smoother performance , and does so only when it's really needed . It also decrease the GPU's performance only in this case the decrease is noticeable and permanent . What is really interesting is that the phone can perform extremely well in this mode . Playing 1080p files for example is possible without any lags or dropped frames which shows among other things that this much power is not needed for this specific task . The only case of performance drop that can be noticed in every day use is when using the browser (or Chrome for that matter...) and scrolling through some heavy pages .
When things ger really interesting is when you realize that in most other every day things that most people do with their phone , the reduced performance is more than just enough for comfortable use . Of course , since Galaxy S 2 is even now more than enough for everything except higher benchmark scores , it makes no surprise that the reduced performance from four A9 cores would also be enough .
The result is having a phone that can perform in an excellent manner and leaving the power saving mode can actually become a "boost" option for those few rare cases that you need some extra power .The obvious advantage is the increased battery life of course combined with absolutely no lag and performance looses .
Of course the gaming fans might argue that all this power is needed for gaming . Well that may be true however it does have some hidden traps too . First of all , the phone just exits the power saving mode automatically when a game (or any other application for that matter) keeps asking for more power for an extended time period . However this is where things are complicated the most .
Being an android device , and having to live in the same world with devices that do not have it's performance (and others that do of course ) means that the Galaxy S 3 will spend most of it's gaming life , playing games far less demanding than it's top performance . Excluding the games designed and optimized for Nvidia's Tegra SoC's that are in most cases not playable in the Galaxy S 3 , almost every other game is designed for a much broader device target group which means that is also designed to demand less resources . So even when playing games , the reduced performance of the Power saving mode is usually enough and the phone does not exit this mode automatically .
Finally , for the rest of us (yes I like squeezing every last performance drop from every device ) there is always the option of just demanidng from the phone all it's power all the time . In this case , especially if you use it's connectivity options along the gaming and multimedia capabilities , the phone will barely give you one day of active usage . That is howvere the price you have to pay in order to be able to carry around in your pocket a protable device that can do almost anything you may have or want to do in every day life .
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