Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Battery Drains Fast

Last Updated on November 8, 2022 by Ernests Embutnieks

The Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 is one of the most cohesive and complete tablets we’ve had the pleasure of reviewing this year. With a battery life of about 9 hours, the tablet should last you throughout the entire day. However, if that isn’t the case and your Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 battery drains fast – worry not!

In this article, we’re going to be going over why exactly your Galaxy Tab A8 is experiencing battery drain and how you can fix the issue. 

Why Is My Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Battery Draining?

While there are a lot of nuanced reasons why your battery may be draining, generally, a newer tablet should not undergo battery drain for a hardware-specific reason unless you’ve purchased it refurbished or used. 

In those cases, you may be suffering from some niche issue which we’ll be getting to as well. But, to keep things simple, we’ll be starting from the most plausible reason to the least plausible reason for why your Galaxy Tab A8 battery is draining and how you can fix it.

But, before we get started with our reason, here are some quick reasons why your battery may be draining:

• Unoptimized Software: If you’ve not really tinkered around with your software much, chances are you just have shoddy settings. No worries, though; we’ll be helping you get set up with your tablet and its settings with the tips we’ve mentioned down below.
• New Tablet Caching: If you’ve formatted / just unboxed your tablet, you will experience battery drain. This is your tablet is downloading updates, caching applications, and setting its filesystem up. Over the course of 3-4 days, your battery will be back to normal.
• Extreme Climate: If you are using your tablet in extreme weather (hot or cold), the battery will not be able to function properly. So, you’ll have less effective charge, which leads to worse battery life.
• Faulty Battery: If all else feels and you experience some weird battery drain, you may have a faulty device. In that case, we recommend returning your device to where you purchased it from or contacting Samsung. 

Turn Off Adaptive Brightness

Adaptive Brightness uses your A8’s ambient light sensor’s to conclusively determine whether you are in a dim or bright area. According to that, your display’s brightness is reduced or increased depending on the situation.

While this is a great feature, it also eats up your battery. This is because it isn’t entirely accurate. A lot of times, you’ll be able to read text perfectly fine with a sliver of brightness, but your tablet will still excessively ramp your brightness up. Therefore, it is better to turn the option off and to just adjust your settings manually.

Here’s how you can turn off auto / adaptive brightness on the Galaxy Tab A8:

• Open the Notification Panel by swiping vertically downwards from the upper right corner
• After doing so, head to your Brightness slider and tap on the small downwards-facing arrow
• After doing so, turn off Adaptive Brightness

Note: With this option disabled, you will have to adjust your brightness more often than usual.

Use Dark Mode / Dark Wallpapers

The Galaxy Tab A8 sports an AMOLED display. What does that mean? Well, an AMOLED display turns off pixels, given that they are black. So, if you had a completely black wallpaper, your tablet would be consuming less battery because those pixels will be turned off to give that pure black color.

Therefore, if you are going to be using your tablet often, we recommend turning on Dark Mode through the notification bar. And to also find great dark wallpapers for your tablet to spice up your A8 while also ensuring you have great battery life. 

Turn On Power Saving Mode

Power Saving Mode reduces the background usage of applications installed on your tablet. Unlike a mobile phone, where applications and their subsequent notifications are important, we’re pretty sure you’ll be fine if you don’t get your daily Candy Crush notification.

By turning on Power Saving Mode, you’ll stop applications from unnecessarily checking for updates in the background which is quite useful especially if you have a lot of freemium games installed as they often try to hog up your battery as much as possible.

Here’s how you can turn on Power Saving Mode on your tablet:

• Open the Settings application
• Scroll down to Battery and device care
• After doing so, scroll down to Power Saving

Put Unused Applications To Sleep

A lot of applications in the background tend to remain there even after you explicitly quit them. In most cases, these can eat up a lot of your battery even if they don’t send any notifications because of some nagging background tasks.

So, you can have your A8 automatically put all these applications to sleep and to basically consider them uninstalled for all intents and purposes until you open them back up again. Here’s how:

• Open the Settings application
• Scroll down to Battery and device care and head to Background usage limits
• Once there, select Put unused apps to sleep

Note: You can always opt for uninstalling an application that you don’t use rather than putting it to sleep.

Turn On Adaptive and Protect Battery

Adaptive Battery helps your tablet acclimate to its current usage and charge / discharge your battery accordingly. Protect battery aims to well, protect your battery by ensuring that its charged up to and discharged only to specific percentages.

By turning both features on, you can expect to have better battery life by virtue of you having a tablet that is able to understand your usage patterns better. Here’s how you can turn on Adaptive Battery and Protect Battery on the Samsung Galaxy A8:

• Open the Settings application
• Now, tap on Battery and device care
• Once there, head to More battery settings
• Now, select Adaptive Battery and Protect Battery
• You’ll be prompted to restart your tablet. Go ahead and do so

Turn On App Battery Optimization

A lot of applications end up soaking your battery regardless of them running in the background or not. Thankfully, Android can limit the battery life consumed by these applications by not letting them consume your CPU. 

On a quick side note, we do not recommend turning on battery optimization for instant-messaging / time-sensitive applications. From what we’ve seen these applications tend to not send out their notifications on time if you turn on battery optimization for them.

Here’s how you can turn on battery optimization on the Tab A8:

• Open the Settings application
• Select Apps
• Tap on any application
  
• Select Battery
• Head to Optimize battery usage
  
• Now, tick every application whose battery you wish to optimize

Conclusion

These are all the ways you can reduce your battery consumption on the Galaxy Tab A8 without ruining your experience. While yes, turning off WiFi and Bluetooth will help with your battery life, but, what’s the use of the tablet then? So, with these tips, you’ll be able to fix why your Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 battery is draining fast without ruining its core experience. 

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