How often do you spare a thought for battery life when you buy a phone? Before rushing to buy the latest and greatest, you might wish to take a moment to carefully read PC Authority's latest lab test. For the full results, see the March 2009 issue of PC Authority magazine.
In our latest labs roundup, we tested 12 smartphones in four different categories:
- Ease of Use
- Features and Design
- Value for Money
. . . And one of the most overlooked areas of smartphone purchases: battery life.
The battery life test
There were a number of steps to our battery testing process:
- Ensure a strong HSDPA signal is selected
- Make a half-hour phone call
- Download a 50MB email attachment
- Turn push email off (where possible)
- The phone is left in standby
- Check a POP3 account every 30 minutes until the battery runs flat.
The results
While we had heard the rumours of the iPhone being under-equipped in the battery department, our tests showed it can still match it with other high-end smartphones. The iPhone measured 96:27 hours - somewhat surprising, based on its reputation. mind you, there's still a big gap between the iPhone and the phone that landed in first place (see below).
Samsung's latest, the i900 Omnia, snuck in for third place with just over 93 hours, not a bad result from the second biggest phone manufacturer in Australia.
The i900 wasn't far in front of the RIM Blackberry Bold 9000, which sat with a similar result in fourth place, proving business users do get good battery life after all.
In first place, the HTC Touch HD was the convincing Labs winner, achieving 119 hours in our test. That's a whopping 23 more hours than the iPhone.
But not everything is touch-perfect for HTC. At the bottom of the group, the once embraced HTC Touch Diamond showed why it continues to be a punching bag for iPhone fanboys. What was once seen as a possible threat to the iPhone, is now little more than a twinkle in HTC's eye.
By comparison, the new HTC Dream looks amazing, thanks to the inclusion of Android OS. We'll look forward to seeing those battery results when we get more tests up and running.
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| Smartphone battery life test results. |