How do the latest iPhones measure up against the current competition?
Apple’s smartphones are praised for a number of things — cool, slick, easy to use, desirable, (sometimes) cutting edge — but the one thing that they have continually failed to impress critics about is their battery life.
Two sites, Phone Arena and Tom’s Guide, did some testing on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus before comparing them against the current competition, and results are mixed.
Phone Arena tested the iPhones with their “custom web-script” that was “designed to replicate the power consumption of typical real-life usage,” and found that the iPhone 6 ran for 5 hours 22 minutes, while the iPhone 6 Plus ran for 6 hours 32 minutes.
In comparison, the Galaxy S5 ran for 7 hours 38 minutes, the Note 3 for 6 hours 8 minutes, and the HTC One (M8) for 7 hours 12 minutes. Sony’s Xperia Z3 topped the charts with 9 hours 29 minutes of run time.
Tom’s Guide ran their standard battery test and decided to use only AT&T and Verizon iPhones to ensure fair assessment.
The Verizon iPhone 6 clocked in 7 hours 27 minutes run time, while the AT&T iPhone 6 Plus ran for a respectable 10 hours.
As it turns out, the iPhone 6 Plus did fairly well against most of the competition, but the iPhone 6 struggled.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 (AT&T) ran for 9 hours 42 minutes, the Note 3 (Verizon) for 9 hours 57 minutes, the HTC One (M8) (Verizon) for 9 hours 52 minutes, and the OnePlus One for a whooping 13 hours 16 minutes.
In all, the results show that Apple has indeed improved battery performance in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus over the iPhone 5S, which clocked 5 hours 2 minutes and 5 hours 46 minutes in the Phone Arena and Tom’s Guide’s test respectively.
However, the tests also show that while Apple is doing okay battery wise for its first entry in the phablet market, their flagship smartphone still has a lot of ground to make up vis the competition.
