In addition, it’s necessary to have appropriate tests that cover the full curve of performance and power, ranging from a display-bound web browsing use case to sustained, intense CPU and GPU loads.Īs with most reviews, our first battery life test is the standard web browsing workload, which loads a set of webpages at a fixed interval, with sufficient time between each page load to ensure that the modem and SoC can reach an idle state. In order to avoid this pitfall, we test battery life with the display set to have a 200 nit brightness when displaying a white image. Although it’s common to standardize at 50% brightness, 50% brightness can be as low as 80 nits or as high as 250 nits depending upon the brightness curve that the OEM sets. One of the first problems we can encounter in trying to test battery life is display brightness, which can significantly affect results in a battery life test.

As previously mentioned, this is a simplistic view of the situation and ignores the other half of the battery life equation.Īs a result, we must test battery life holistically, which is far from trivial in most cases.

If we simply looked at this metric, it would be rather trivial to simply write off the Galaxy S6 as worse than the S5 in battery life. The Galaxy S6 has a 2550 mAh, 3.85V battery, which is 91% of the Galaxy S5’s battery. For the past few years, it has gone without saying that battery capacity would increase from year to year, but for the first time ever, Samsung has gone backwards in this regard. The Galaxy S6 and S6 edge are in a similarly peculiar situation. Last year, one of the best examples of this was the One M8 compared against the Galaxy S5, which showed a slight edge in favor of the One M8 despite the smaller battery.

It’s common to see people assume that battery capacity and battery life are closely correlated, but this completely ignores total system power draw. In theory, a phone should never run out of battery in a single day no matter the use case, but battery life is a complex issue to address. The anxiety that is associated with running out of battery is probably one of the worse experiences to have when using a smartphone, which is why good battery life is important.

At this point, it really goes without saying that battery life can make or break the experience of a smartphone.

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