Smartphones With the Best Battery Life
These phones will run all day, then keep going
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For many people, battery life is one of the most important factors in choosing a smartphone. After all, the best phone in the world isn’t worth much if it can’t get through the day.
The good news is that smartphone battery life has improved significantly in recent years, courtesy of the increased capacity of batteries—often 4,000 mAh (milliamp hours) and longer—and processors and wireless connections that smartly adjust power consumption to suit the job at hand. That means some phones can last two days on a single charge with typical use. (Just don’t expect to binge-watch all the “Star Wars” movies without recharging.)
Keep in mind that a large-capacity battery requires a large-capacity shell, so the smartphones with the best battery life tend to be on the bigger side, with most measuring at least 6.5 inches diagonally.
Tips to Extend Battery Life
If your phone has a low-power mode, you might not need to do each of these. The feature automatically makes some of the adjustments when the battery drops below a certain level.
- Set the screen brightness to Auto so that the device can adjust to indoor and outdoor conditions.
- Lower the baseline brightness. With most phones, you can do this by using a sliding switch in the display menu.
- Set your phone’s display to Dark Mode.
- Set the screen to go to sleep after 15 or 30 seconds of inactivity.
- Turn on airplane mode when you’re in a location with no WiFi or cellular signal.
- Stop infrequently used apps from refreshing in the background.
- Reduce the frequency of updates for email, social network feeds, and other apps to once every hour.
- Toggle off keyboard sounds.
- Use WiFi instead of a cellular connection when possible. Our tests have found that WiFi consumes less battery power.
- And if you need to quickly top off your battery before hitting the road, use a traditional charger instead of a wireless one. Although wireless chargers have come a long way, you generally get more juice faster by plugging in your phone.
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Phones With the Best Battery Life
For each of the phones listed below, we’ve provided the Overall Score along with the score for battery life and info on the model’s wireless charging capability. The phones are ranked by the number of hours they logged in our battery testing.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that using WiFi would tend to drain your smartphone battery more quickly than using a cellular connection.
