The be-all, end-all battery life shootout

by Chris Ziegler posted Aug 12th 2006 at 7:47PM

We all know that manufacturers' listed talk times have limited basis in reality, but since the margin of fantasy varies from make to make and from model to model, there's really no way of accurately judging relative performance as you're cross-shopping phones. Norwegian site Amobil has undertaken the admirable (but daunting) task of performing 45 talk time tests in real-world conditions, spending countless hours and kroner in the process. To keep the talk times honest, Amobil simply placed a call in the same spot of their office for every handset, letting music continually play on both ends to roughly simulate a conversation until the test phone died. Surprisingly, Sony Ericsson dominated the GSM tests, rocking three models that stayed in the game for 7 hours or longer; less surprisingly, UMTS performance was eclipsed by GSM across the board with the Nokia E60 besting the 3G pack at 5:47. Frankly, if this report doesn't get you fired up for alternative power sources, we don't know what will.

[Thanks, Are S.]

Filed under: Studies

Tags: amobil, battery, endurance, life, performance, report, study

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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Vince D @ Aug 13th 2006 8:21AM

I have the Nokia e61 and the Sony Ericsson k750i and the battery seems like it last forever. I went a whole week in offline mode on my e61 while I was using my K750i and it was at 3/4 full when I went to switch to it. 1/4 of my juice runs out on a typical day with K750i.

Neutral

Carb @ Aug 13th 2006 6:43PM

My Siemens let me go without charging only 1 day!!! But I talk about 3 hours a day. And listen to music

Neutral

shadekh @ Aug 13th 2006 11:58PM

I have a k750i, and use it rather heavily, and still it manages to last quite a while, sometimes even a week, depending on how long i play Tennis on it. I use it quite heavily, and it lasts much, much longer than any nokia phone i owned, even when using the camera extensively, surprisingly. I had the Nokia n90 as well, and its battery life was barely half of the k750. Vince D above might want to reduce the backlight to 50%, which is still perfectly usable, to save some power. The k750 can easily last a week in offline mode, btw.

And i used to think its because i nearly fully discharge the battery before charging. I am aware li-ions dont have the memory effect, but old habits die hard.

Neutral

Donald @ Aug 14th 2006 12:54AM

Wow, so the lithium-polymer batteries do have a noticable effect on battery life... quite impressive.

Neutral

Michael Oryl @ Aug 14th 2006 7:57AM

This test methodology is flawed. I used to use a music track for testing battery talk times as well, until I realize that many modern handsets use some sort of noise reduction system that filters out music and keeps it from being transmitted - saving battery power.

In order to bypass this, you need to play a track of somebody actually talking - which is what we do now.

The change generally has one of two effects. Battery life is either reduced by a third or so, for those using noise-reduction, or it stays the same, for handsets that don't support any sort of noise reduction.

But with that said, the SE handsets still seem to be the best performers by far.

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