4 smartphones with anxiety-inducing battery life (and 4 that last for ages)

Picking a phone that’ll alleviate your fears isn’t straightforward. Sure, battery capacity is usually included in a phone’s specs. But it’s not about the size of the battery, it’s what you do with it. Efficiency is often more important than raw power.

Our battery testing is here to help. As part of our rigorous lab test, we use robot arms to help us measure how long each phone will last between charges.

For realistic simulation, the phones mostly sit on standby, with the arms programmed to occasionally take a photo, make a call or access the internet.

We set each phone’s display to a regular brightness of 300 nits, so they’re comparable. We also repeat the test at the phone’s maximum brightness level.

Now, we’ve trawled through our lab data to identify 4 phones we wouldn’t recommend to battery enthusiasts, followed by 4 that are a perfect match.

Avoid these phones if you’re nervous about battery drain

These aren’t bad phones. They just underperform in this one facet.

Remember that all rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time. So, as a phone gets older, its battery life will decrease from what we measured in the lab.

Samsung Galaxy A26 5G

Price: $549
This new budget-focused Galaxy A phone has earned the unwelcome distinction of having the shortest battery life in our test, with a 28-hour yield. That might sound serviceable, at least when the phone is new. But it might be a different story after a couple of years of battery degradation.

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Google Pixel 9

Price: $1,245
Last year’s mainline Pixel phone squeaked in with 28½ hours of battery life in our standardised testing. But its vibrant screen afforded it a curt 21 hours at full brightness.

As if pre-empting our criticism, Google has increased the capacity of the battery in this year’s Pixel 9a variant.

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Samsung Galaxy S24

Price: $1,155
This 2024 Samsung was a low point in the battery performance of the premier Galaxy S series. Samsung switched from a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor in the S23 to a home-brand Samsung processor for this phone. It proved to be significantly more power-hungry, prompting a shift back to Snapdragon for this year’s S25.

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Apple iPhone SE 2022

Price: $849
The third-generation iPhone SE appears to be the last of its lineage, following its discontinuation in February with no replacement. It’s a relic in many ways, including in its miniscule battery capacity of 2,000mAh, where nearly every other phone on the market has 4,000mAh or more.

Frankly, it’s impressive that the SE manages to eke 30 hours from such a tiny battery. Just don’t keep it on full brightness, or it’ll only last 21½ hours.