All right,
Let's decide once and for all in 2022 which smartphone company gives you the best battery life we've got five phones. The brand new Samsung galaxy’s 22 ultra, the iPhone 13 pro max, the Google Pixel 6 pro, and then Xiaomi's latest flagship the 12 pro, and then just next to that s22 ultra we also added in last year's s21 ultra so we'll be able to see not just if Samsung’s managed to beat the competition but also how much they've improved by and just to make sure that this test is 100. I’ve bought us a brand new version of it so everything has 100 battery health and so is pretty representative of what you would get if you went into a shop and bought one of these now so all the phones are calibrated in terms of brightness we unplugged the charges and start that timer and just so you know in these tests.
If a phone can get five hours of screen on time that's solid, six hours is good, seven hours is great and if a phone can pass eight hours then that is power-user level right there and I just want to stress that this is a very important battery test because you might know that for some time now Samsung has been having quite a bit of trouble with their own in-house Exynos chipsets year after year they've just lagged behind in terms of both performance and battery efficiency but this time the Exynos 2200 chip that's sitting inside this s22 is meant to be the savior and if we check the battery percentages so far well the pixel is winning would you look at that that was a phone that was pretty heavily criticized for not having a great battery. I do want to mention a few things that Samsung, as done with this next generation s22 ultra which they're saying, will elevate it to another level of battery life so for starters because this phone is more intelligent it can now predict based on what you're doing with your phone when you're not going to need your Wi-Fi and signal and then temporarily for short periods of time put them to sleep without you realizing but it's not just that they've also used a very special display on this phone you can see how like sometimes these screens are flickering quite a lot other times less so well that's because each phone is using dynamic refresh rate that lets their screens refresh at the minimum refresh rate that they need to display the content you're looking at which saves power and while last year's Samsung the iPhone and the pixel can all go from 120 hertz to as low as 10 hertz. The s22 ultra as well as Xiaomi’s mi 12 pro use a new generation of this technology that can take them as low as one hertz.
13 pro max since the day it came out the battery is life-changing on that thing but then interestingly that's being trailed by not the s22 ultra but in fact the s21 ultra there's still plenty of time for that to change but it is still surprising if we drop all the battery capacities on screen. The s22 ultra has the same size battery as their last phone and so if you pair that with what should be a bunch of optimizations then it is a little fishy how it's not impossible that there might be a software update in the future which helps it out but you've got to remember that at the time when the most number of people are going to buy this thing is now so you need to know how good it is now not after you've received it.
Samsung has given it to reviewers for testing so either they've got a PR team that needs a serious looking at or it's not going to get much better than this and that's. The other thing in testing is battery life does not tend to improve with updates the battery life of an s21 ultra for example is not better now than it was at launch last year anyways as we have recorded some 4k video on each phone.
Draining the Battery
This is probably the most demanding thing you can do on a smartphone you're using just about every component, at the same time the batteries start to fall a little faster and then straight from there. We have taken video clip that we've just filmed on each and load it into adobe premiere, a video editing program with the plan being to make a minor adjustment to the file and then re-export a full version of it to kill the phones all over again and if i hit that export button the iPhone finishes the render way faster than any other phone followed by last year's s21 ultra we are just approaching the three hour mark by the way and the primary message that I actually want to get through in this video is that i am just glad that none of these phones are flagging at this
point i remember when i used to make these tests like four years ago and pretty much no phone would ever hit six hours so progress is being made which is important because i feel like as our phones have gotten more and more useful we are increasingly offloading more and more tasks that would have been done using other gadgets onto them our smartphones are now our primary navigation devices our content machines are banking platforms and so it's not just that we use them more and therefore we need them to last longer. But it would also be a bigger problem than ever if they suddenly died randomly in the middle of the day one thing to also keep in mind for this test is that
I’ve made sure that all phones are on their default settings I think it's the fairest way to do it because it's probably what 95 percent of people will use them on but just bear in mind that it does mean different things for each phone they are all matched in terms of having a lighter colored wallpaper removing the sim card from each as that can create a whole load of extra variables and keeping them on light mode, instead of dark mode but where they differ is that both the pixel and the iPhone run a much higher screen resolution than the Samsung’s in the Xiaomi and neither of those two phones gives you the ability to lower it that said it can't be that much of a disadvantage given that the iPhone is leading by more than 10 percentage points one thing.
I do always notice about the iPhone in tests though is that even though Apple has trimmed down those black screen borders since the original iPhone 10 they do still look pretty chunky up against this entire full screen near bezel-less androids? It doesn't affect the screen size itself though so as far as batteries are concerned it shouldn't have an impact
S21 vs. S22
s21 ultra is going to beat the s22 ultra and I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how this could be a possible couple of thoughts one the s pen that you now get inside this new s22 ultra could be sipping some extra power two it could be that this new Exynos chip even though it might be more efficient for some tasks may actually use more energy when being pushed to its peak level of performance because that peak is higher than before three it's also possible that the thermals inside this new phone just aren't as good and if the phone is getting hotter its battery will drain faster and finally it could be some level of software optimization unlikely given that with past.
Results
Google Pixel 6 Pro
The fifth position is the Google Pixel 6 pro it's a very strong performance for last place with a time of seven hours and six minutes and so even though it has lost this test unless you're an extreme power user I don't think the battery should be a reason to not consider this phone
Xiaomi 12 Pro
Fourth place we have the Xiaomi 12 pro which is a really solid refinement from last year's mi 11 and it definitely looks a lot better too but yeah so this phone had a total time of seven hours 34 which puts it very firmly in the category of great battery life especially given that it has the smallest capacity battery of all the androids.
S22 Ultra
we've got the s22 ultra and I am a little concerned confused why this didn't outlast its predecessor if we just put that all aside for a second eight hours and eight minutes is a hell of a lot of screen on time then so as far as the battery is concerned.
S21 Ultra
I’ve got no hesitation in still recommending it the s21 ultra wasn't really far ahead at 8 hours 15. so there's probably not quite enough of a gap to conclusively say that it beats its successor but at the same time it is enough to say that it doesn't lose to it also side.
iPhone 13 Pro Max
This is the first time I’ve had proper hands-on with the silver variant of this phone isn't it just beautiful oh yeah and then in the first place we have the iPhone 13 pro max let me ask you how long do you think it lasted 8 hours 30 9 hours nope 10 hours 27 minutes it's not just better it is in a whole other tier of endurance.
Great article 👍
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