For some people, battery life is the most important quality when comparing smartphones.
Maybe you work 12 hour shifts at the hospital and need a phone to keep up, or maybe you don’t have a lot of electrical sockets in your house.
Whatever the reason may be, you need the best Android battery life possible. Today, we’re going to help you pick the world’s best Android device in terms of battery life.
Battery capacity versus battery life
If you’re researching Android battery life data online, then you’re going to find two major points of comparison between devices: battery capacity and battery life.
Battery capacity is the size of the battery in terms of mAh. mAh stands for milliampere-hour and this simply tells you how much energy has been squeezed into the battery.
Of course, since every smartphone consumes battery power at different rates, capacity doesn’t tell you a whole lot about actual battery life. That being said, here are the largest Android batteries ranked from highest to lowest:
Clearly, the Note 3 – which is also the largest smartphone listed here – has the largest battery capacity. Coincidentally, the iPhone 5S, which is the smallest smartphone listed here, has the smallest battery capacity.
Battery life rankings
If you’re looking for the best battery life, then don’t use the graph above. Instead, use the rankings below, which tell you how top mobile devices fare in real world situations:
Galaxy S5: 8 to 10 hours
Galaxy S4: 8 to 10 hours
Google Nexus 5: 5 to 7 hours
Droid Maxx: 13 to 15 hours
Galaxy Note 3: 12 to 14 hours
LG G Flex: 15 to 17 hours
Motorola Moto X: 9 to 11 hours
iPhone 5S: 8 to 10 hours
The LG G Flex and the Droid Maxx are widely recognized to be the best smartphones for battery life available today. However, the newly-released Galaxy S5 has shown promise and, depending on how intensely you use it, could be the best combination of high performance and high battery life.
Creating accurate battery life rankings is difficult because there are so many different ways people use their smartphones. People who connect to Wi-Fi networks at home or work all day, for example, are going to use less battery than someone who drives around connecting to 4G LTE all day. Apps, background tasks, screen brightness, and countless other factors all come into play as well.
Here’s the good news: smartphone manufacturers now seem to realize that people don’t care how thin a smartphone is if that thinness is a tradeoff for battery life. Most people agree that a couple extra millimeters of thickness is worth an extra hour of battery life.
