Battery Life

Battery Life is an important consideration when it comes to buying a new handset. How long your battery can last really dictates the use of your smartphone - it's no good if it's struggling for battery after a few hours web browsing. Our battery life articles use a range of sources to consider the battery life of top of the range smartphones.

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

How Sony’s STAMINA Mode works

How does STAMINA mode work?

Sony Xperia ZBattery life is one of the aspects of smartphone design that still requires significant improvement. One way to facilitate this will be through hardware technology breakthroughs, one of which we recently covered here. The other approach to improving battery life, however, is by optimising the software used on handsets. With handsets such as the Xperia Z, Sony has tried to do just that with STAMINA mode.

An easy assumption to make when it comes to smartphone battery life is that placing your handset on standby will stop apps from running and therefore stop power consumption. This is incorrect – apps still run in the background and there are constant synchronisation requests for things such as message updates and notifications.

Using STAMINA mode, Sony does its best to address the problem of apps running in the background. It achieves this by blocking data traffic a minute after the handset is placed on standby. Whilst doing this the phone automatically logs your IP address, meaning you are instantly connected once the phone is powered on again.

When STAMINA mode is activated, you will still receive phone calls, text messages and picture messages. However, you should be aware that notifications that require an internet connection will stop.

So, if I have STAMINA mode on, I won’t get alerts such as Whatsapp, Email, Facebook, etc?

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May 7, 2013 By 1 Comment

BlackBerry Q10: Battery Life

How good is the BlackBerry Q10 Battery Life?

BlackBerry Q10

According to BlackBerry, the Q10 should last up to two days without a charge and a good level of usage. It’s got a larger battery than BlackBerry’s touchscreen flagship, the Z10, plus it’s dark theme will help to conserve juice thanks to the AMOLED display.

Naturally the Q10 will have better battery life than other market leaders with their 5″ screens, but if a long lasting battery and improved productivity are more important to you than a big display, the Q10 is a worthwhile consideration. Of course, if you want even more battery than what the Q10 offers out of the box, there’s always the Q10 battery charging bundle available.

Let’s have a look at what some reviews have had to say about the battery life of the Q10′s 2100mAh battery:

CrackBerry

There’s no doubt in saying that CrackBerry were more than impressed with the Q10′s performance, calling its battery life ‘the best ever on a BlackBerry’. Here’s a few more lines on their initial thoughts:

“The Q10 battery comes in at 2100 mAh – that’s 16% bigger than 1800 mAh Z10 battery and over 70% bigger than the 1230 mAh battery of the Bold 9900. With the smaller screen size, dark theme option and other tweaks in the Q10 OS, we expect the battery life to be more than sufficient for both average and power users alike.

While we’ve been able to put the Q10 through the paces for this review, we haven’t had the chance to knock out a “real world” test of the battery just yet. What we can say is that the battery life here is awesome. Even with our constant use of the Q10, the battery has held up strong and made us proud.”

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April 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Super-powered battery breakthrough could eventually make its way to smartphones

“You could jump-start a car with the battery in your cell phone”

While smartphone technology has improved at an incredible rate over the last half a decade, battery technology has not accelerated at quite the same pace. We’re now at a point where screen size for a phone is about to plateau around the 5″ mark, so one of the next big challenges for manufacturers will be improving battery life.

Researchers at the University of Illinois could assist with the task ahead having created batteries that can be ’1,000 times faster than competing tech’. We can’t get ahead of ourselves just yet – the technology needs to be proved to be scalable in production and safe for the mass market – but it’s progress in the right direction.

Low battery

I shan’t go into the science behind the new discovery, which is explained nicely in this BBC article, but it’s worth noting that those involved have said that ‘in principle the technology is scalable all the way up to electronics and vehicles.’ Ultimately we could have smaller batteries that are significantly more powerful than those currently available.

We’re some way off this yet, but perhaps the most eye-grabbing statement to be taken from details provided by project leader Prof. William Kind is quite an exciting one:

“You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone.”

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March 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

HTC One has the best web browsing battery life of any device

Although GSM Arena has not yet released its full review for the HTC One Battery Life, some of the stats that it’s released so far show that the HTC One is King when it comes to web browsing time.

The GSM Arena stats below, which are taken from the Samsung Galaxy S4 battery life tests, show a web browsing time of 9 hours 58 minutes, beating the huge batteries of the Motorola RAZR Maxx and Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Video Playback is also reasonable, measuring in at just over 10 hours. Talk time is the area in which it fairs worst, although the 13 hours 38 minutes that it offers should be enough to get the heaviest of users through the day.

HTC One Battery Life
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March 28, 2013 By 10 Comments

Samsung Galaxy S4: Battery Life

How many hours can you get out of the Samsung Galaxy S4 battery life?

Updated Thursday May 2nd. Now that a few reviews of the S4 have surfaced, let’s have a look at what has been said of the handset’s battery life:

Android Police

AP list the battery life as one of the SGS4′s good points in their review:

“It’s good, though I did expect a bit more. The S4 by no means has poor battery life, but given its 2600mAh Li-ion cell, you’d think Samsung’s latest and greatest would keep on trucking well beyond a phone like the HTC One. It just doesn’t, though. The battery life seems ever-so-slightly above average, at least for a high-end phone. In fact, it doesn’t fare all that much better than the Galaxy S III. The Galaxy S III got pretty decent battery life, sure, but I think most people were expecting the substantially enlarged juice-box in the S4 to go a little further.”

TechRadar

TechRadar also speaks well of the S4′s battery life. Here’s an extract from what they had to say:

“For one person the Galaxy S4 is a treasured beast, only brought out into the dappled light to check emails manually once an hour for most of the day. For the next it’s an all-powerful media beast, one that will be streaming movies over a 4G connection while auto-updating every app under the sun.

Whatever you use your phone for, in our eyes it should be able to handle what the handset’s main USPs are.

But the good news is that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is able to handle all the things you can throw at it and still keep the 2600mAh battery chugging along at the end of the day. We found that in general use it was very well received, as nothing we found could hurt it.”

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March 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

HTC One: Battery Life

How good is battery life on the HTC One?

Update 21/03/13

A fair few websites have now released reviews of the HTC One, so let’s take a look at what a selection of them have to say about the battery:

Techno Buffalo: 

“The HTC One fared pretty well with battery life, but you need to remember this unit didn’t support 4G LTE networks in the U.S., which is a big drain. The device sports a 2,300mAh battery, and we were able to take the device off the charger at 7:00 a.m and use it for 2-3 hours of talk time, leave two separate email accounts checking email every 5 minutes throughout the day and leave BlinkFeed, Twitter, Facebook running. We also had the brightness set to around 80 percent and used the phone to surf the Internet throughout the day. By midnight we put it back on the charger with about 35 percent of the battery left. That’s on a par with most other devices, but again, we’ll reserve our full battery life rating for when we see how it handles LTE networks.”

Android Central

“We found the phone’s battery performance to be decent, but not outstanding. It’d easily last us a full day, just as the Sony Xperia Z and LG Nexus 4 have in the past. Some of that will depend on network connectivity, of course.With moderate to heavy usage patterns consisting of browsing and social networking over LTE, HSPA and Wifi, music playback, photography and video recording, we clocked just under 14 hours of use before reaching the warning level of fifteen percent. With more conservative use, mostly restricted to Wifi, we reached the end of the day with around 30 percent left after 18 or so hours on battery. With all day spent on Wifi, we reached around 50 percent in the same timespan. We used the HTC One on DC-HSDPA on Three UK and LTE on EE, and we didn’t notice any significant additional battery drain when using 4G data services as opposed to good old HSPA. (That’s in line with other modern 4G devices we’ve reviewed, including the Xperia Z and Galaxy S3 LTE.)”

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