Samsung's giving you more control over charging options in One UI 7

If there’s one smartphone component that everybody’s got a bit of a love/hate relationship with, it’s got to be our phones’ batteries. Modern batteries are energy-dense, fast to charge, and make our power-hungry phones as useful as they are. But they also demand constant attention, especially when it comes to making sure they’re charged when we need them. With this month’s release of the One UI 7 beta, Samsung’s giving Galaxy users one convenient new way to keep their batteries happy and healthy.

Batteries are temperamental chemical cocktails that sometimes feel like they’re just doing everything they can to burst into flames. And as a consequence of that delicate nature, pushing them as hard as we can, all the time, is a sure-fire way to hurt their long-term storage capacity. That’s exactly why Android has cooked up systems like Adaptive Charging, where rather than charging your phone all the way up to 100% whenever you plug it in, the charge level your battery is held at is limited to 80%, supposedly extending its life.

Samsung offers its own battery protection tools in One UI, and had previously given users a choice between three charging options. You could throw caution to the wind with the basic mode, which lets your charge hover between 95% and 100%. Or you could keep a firm limit on just how high your battery charges with Samsung’s “maximum” mode, stopping charging at 80% and holding it there. Finally, there’s an adaptive mode which is basically maximum when you’re asleep, and switches over to basic right before you wake up.

With One UI 7, users are discovering some new options in there, as shared by Tarun Vats on X. Instead of maximum mode only stopping at 80%, you’ll now be able to manually set that limit between 80% and 95%.

Sure, the higher you push that number, the more wear and tear your battery’s likely to experience, and that could mean reduced charge capacity in a couple years. But if you were already finding yourself at risk of running out of juice when trying to get through the day on maximum mode, this extra 5 or 10% could conceivably make a big difference. At the end of the day, we just really like the idea of having more control over our phones and how they operate.

Samsung’s One UI 7 beta is currently available for Galaxy S24 phones in select countries. Expect access to spread to additional regions and hardware in the near future.