Our original battery test (the Endurance rating) has served as a reliable benchmark for 12 years. Mobile and Internet technology have evolved a lot in this period, and the change in usage patterns has prompted us to renew our battery life test in autumn 2023.
We are now shifting our focus to measuring four active usage scenarios, which include the calling test, web browsing test, video streaming test, and gaming test.
We combine these four tests to produce our new one Active usage score. The active usage score is an estimate of battery life if you use the device with a combination of all four activities. It’s a balanced mix of using these, with a slight emphasis on Web and video.
The new and old battery life ratings are both measured in hours of battery life, but they are not comparable because the new rating assumes only active use. It doesn’t take into account the time you could put your phone down and only have power on standby.
A nice feature is that you can adjust the active usage score based on your usage patterns and preferences. This custom metric is saved persistently for your browser, and unless you use the Reset button on the top widget, you’ll see your preferred usage mix in all battery tests you run in the future.
Feel free to play with the numbers as much as you want. Just remember that the runtime numbers and active usage score should be used to compare phones that have been subjected to the same test. You may not get the same runtimes if you attempt the same testing tasks on your own because the network environment, number of background processes, ambient temperature, and available ambient light are important variables for your phone’s battery life.
Test setup
For each test we measure how long it would take to discharge the battery from 100% to 0%. In designing our test setup, we tried to remove as many variables that might be out of our control.
For screening tests:
- Screen brightness is set to 200 nits using a 75% APL white model.
- Location services are active.
- Airplane mode is on and Bluetooth is off.
- Wi-Fi is turned on and connected to a network.
- The volume is set to 15% to prevent variations in speaker configuration from influencing the result.
Call test
The Call test remains a staple in our battery test suite. While it will run on a 4G network from now on, the results remain largely consistent with our past tests.
For this test, we aim to provide a consistent network quality environment and consistent call volume.
Test web browsing
Updated with a new set of modern web pages with scrolling and touch input every 3 seconds, the web browsing test now simulates real-life usage much better.
The new touch input makes this test more relevant for real-life use because each touch causes a spike in CPU usage and also a spike in the screen’s variable refresh rate. The added scrolling also actively engages the GPU in re-rendering the web page.
This revamped test also takes into account mixed usage of social networking apps (Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Snapchat etc.) as it produces identical scores in our tests.
Test video streaming
We’ve moved away from playing local video files and now stream our own video directly from YouTube. Video now has a higher resolution and a balanced mix of bright and dark scenes.
This updated test also takes into account short-term use of the video app. We’ve done extensive testing on TikTok, and the results of our video streaming test are close enough to be representative of this use case as well (with the benefit of being more consistent because we control the video content).
Game test
A new addition to our test suite, the Game Test is the test where we loop the same level of a popular 3D game. We chose a highly rated game title with over 10 million downloads in the Google Play Store and high ratings on Apple’s AppStore. It has a relatively high GPU load and a mostly medium CPU load with occasional spikes.
The gaming test is performed at a 60Hz refresh rate so as to create a level playing field regardless of whether the device supports high refresh rate games or not. Games with a high refresh rate are particularly taxing on the battery due to the higher framerate, so in this test they will have a heavy impact on the battery life (up to 50% shorter battery life). Keep this in mind if you play games at high framerate on your smartphone.
Interestingly, adding touch input to the gaming test doesn’t seem to affect battery life at all, which shows that it’s a really small percentage of battery consumption compared to 3D gaming itself.
All tests were automated for our editorial purposes by our industry partners at SmartViser.
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