Improving battery life on Verizon's Samsung Galaxy S3

Your overall goals in order to maximize battery life are (1) to eliminate AWAKE time when the screen is OFF, and (2) for the battery drain to be almost flat when the screen is OFF. Use the Settings/Battery graph as your main indicator. Battery and data transfer go hand in hand, so you need to balance syncronization needs with battery consumption.   

The list below is long and if you were to implement all of these (like I do), you could argue that this diminishes the smartphone experience, but without battery you won't have a smartphone experience at all.  For example, I try to configure news and RSS to update only every 24 hours.  Each user must judge how much functionality to trade off for battery life.

Most of the tips below work for any Android phone.

• Keep Wi-fi on during sleep "only when plugged in". Settings/wifi/Advanced (update: for me, the "ALWAYS" setting resulted in far lower battery use, so that is the setting i use now. THIS SETTING HAS THE BIGGEST IMPACT ON BATTERY LIFE) 
•  (Verizon specific) Avoid Global network mode, which was enabled with the Android 4.1.1 update (Jelly Bean). Settings/ Wireless and Network/More settings/Mobile networks: Change Network mode to "CDMA/LTE" rather than "Global"
• (Verizon specific) If possible, turn off LTE (4G) and use 3G. (but the PhoneInfo app that supposedly enables this, seems to have been taken off Google Market. There are several PhoneInfo apps in the market, but none match the screenshots shown here, so they may be virusware.) Yes, I know you bought a 4G phone for really fast downloads but if your battery life is terrible, you might try it.
  
• Turn the screen brightness down. Settings/display/brightness: turn auto brightness off and turn brightness level down to 20% or lower.
• Under Settings/display: Turn Smart stay off and Turn auto adjust screen tone ON.
• Settings/accounts/Google: click on your Google account and only enable syncing you need: for example, enable Calendar, Contacts, Gmail but disable Google Photos, Play Books, Play Mags, Play Movies, Play Music, Google+, Instant Upload, Internet Picasa Web Albums.
• "Restrict background data to Wi-fi" for apps like Gallery, Flipboard, Google+. Click on apps shown under Settings/Data usage.
• In Google+/settings: turn off notifications, messenger, hangouts, Instant Upload.
• Turn off Backup Assistant unless you really intend to use it and don't have a better backup system.
• Svoice/settings: turn off location data and disable the wake-up command (which states that it consumes battery).
• Google Maps/Location settings: turn off Location reporting, Location sharing, and location history
• Configure apps that sync news like Flipbook and RSS readers to sync as infrequently as you can tolerate.
• Turn Settings/Power Saver ON
• Under Settings/Applications/All: disable AllSharePlay, Verizon apps, Samsung apps.

Other ways to extend battery life:

• If you are rooted, you have access to apps like BetterBatteryStats, etc which can tell you exactly which apps are causing wakelocks. This is worth rooting for because otherwise it can be a painful process of trial and error to find battery consuming apps.
• The Facebook and Linkedin Apps are evil. They track you on GPS continually even when the phone is off, and run the battery down. Avoid them.
• Buy a portable pocket charger.  I like the PowerGen 5200mAHr and 8400mAHr portable chargers. This can charge any device that uses a USB charging cable.
• Populate your world with chargers. For example: Home-downstairs, Home-downstairs, Car (we like PowerGen's dual USB charger), and Office.

The following hints are from http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/galaxy-s3-problems-what-users-complain-about-the-most/

• If you have Chrome installed, fire it up and choose Settings > Developer tools and then uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
• Some people believe that Samsung's preinstalled apps could eat a lot of battery life even if you're not using them. Some users reported success after disabling their Samsung account and various Samsung apps. Go to Settings > Applications manager and choose the All tab then disable Samsung Account, Samsung Backup, Samsung Apps, Samsung Cloud Data Relay along with anything else on the list you don't use. The disabled apps drop to the bottom of the All list so you can always enable them again if you encounter any problems.