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Is the battery life of your Samsung Galaxy SIII describable as ‘dire’ or ‘appalling’? We know the feeling, as our handset has recently been lasting less than 8 hours each day even with minimal usage.
Usually we would get upwards of 16 hours, tiding us through from taking it off charge in the morning until bedtime, but it seems something had gone wrong. We’ve noticed plenty of others are experiencing the same issue, and the root of the cause appears to be ‘GPSD’.
If you’re noticing that your battery life is poor, take a look at what’s using your battery up. Open Settings and tap Battery to see a rundown of what’s sapping your charge. At the top you should have Cell Standby and Screen, but some of you may notice something called GPSD topping the list with somewhere in the region of 50% used. This is what’s causing poor battery life, but we’ve found a fix for it.
GPSD is a piece of software that interfaces with the GPS receiver in the device to find your location, and when working properly you shouldn’t ever really see it appearing in the battery life usage.
With the Galaxy SIII, Samsung offers a remote location service for the phone to help users find their lost handset through a website, just as Apple does with Find My iPhone. Unfortunately it appears to be causing the GPS Daemon to continually search and update your phone’s position, thus running down the battery. While it’s a useful feature, you’ll need to deactivate it for now to save your battery and hope that Samsung issues a fix for it soon. Here’s how to do it:
- Tap Settings
- Scroll down, tap Security
- Scroll down, tap Remote controls
- Enter the password for your Samsung account, tap OK in top right
- Slide the switch in the top right corner towards the left, where it should change to grey
That should solve the issue for you, however the GPSD can be caused to run uncharacteristically by dodgy applications. If you’ve followed our steps and you’re still having issues, think back to the last 5 apps you installed, remove them and then re-download them one by one to single out the problematic one.
Let us know if our guide solved the issue for you or if you’re still having troubles.
Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.
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i found a solution to the cursed gpsd hell. . tried everything. . master resets. . rebooting dozens of times. . disabled everthing on my galaxy s4. . rooted and custom roms. . nothing worked. . gpsd refused to stop. . i sat down with a hammer in my hand ready to smash the phone when it hit me. . its not the phone its was the sim card. . yes the sim. . turns out that my galaxy s4 is a gt-19500 model. . its not a LTE/4G phone. . the sim card is a mtn network sim with LTE activated. . what i done is . . went to settings. . connections. . more networks. . mobile networks . .network mode and set it to GSM only. . bloody hell . . it worked. . installed my stock 4.2.2 firmware again. . left nothing disabled or uninstalled for testing. . the phone runs like new. . only downfall is that its running on a slower edge network. . my wife is using the s4 . .she mostly use it for whattsapp and dont do downloads and stuff and dont need high speed. . I’m still convinced that its a network problem because the phone was fine for more than a year and a half with the same sim card thats LTE activated. . will see what happens after a week or so to see if the phone will run on HSDPA network without triggering the bloody gpsd. . i think MTN must have made changes to the network that affected thousands of phones. . my LG G3 is also LTE. . tried te sim from the galaxy s4 and found no problems. . put my sim in the s4 . .and there it was again. . gpsd triggered again . . put it on GSM only in nework settings and yet again the gpsd was gone. . looks like a network problem that affects galaxy s4’s
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