Apple iPhone Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Alfredo Padilla Published on June 29, 2007 Comment on this |
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UPDATE: (10th July 2007) : We have discovered that the iPhone that we used for our first round of tests has what seems to be a faulty battery; we are re-running our tests with another unit. An earlier version of this review featured test results from these units; we have updated this review with results that we think are more representative of the results you will get with an iPhone that charges correctly. For more information on the issues we encountered with the batteries in some of our review units, see here.
Talk Time (8.48)
After extensive testing with several iPhones, we tested the iPhone as having a talk time battery life of 7 hours and 4 minutes. That's a good time, and is just a little shorter than Apple's claimed battery life of up to 8 hours. It beats quite a few of our comparison phones by several hours; the Ocean, the N95 and the Treo 750 all had significantly shorter talk time results. The LG Prada had a little longer talk time, though, and the BlackBerry 8800 had more than three hours over the iPhone, so if you make a lot of calls or travel away from power sources, the 8800 may be a better pick.
| Handset | Talk Time Battery Life | Score |
| Apple iPhone | 7 hours 4 minutes |
8.48 |
| Blackberry 8800 | 10 hours 24 minutes |
10.6 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours 7 minutes | 4.94 |
| LG Prada | 7 hours 45 minutes | 9.3 |
| Nokia N95 | 5 hours 43 minutes |
6.86 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 3 hours 58 minutes | 4.76 |
Remember that, like all of our scored tests, this result is with the default settings, which is with WiFi enabled, but not connected to a specific WiFi network. We also ran a series of tests to see if using different settings had much effect on the battery life, and found some interesting results. Firstly, we found that connecting the iPhone to a WiFi network had an adverse impact on battery life; the same phone under the same conditions connected to a WiFi network had a battery life of 6 hours 23 minutes; that's 31 minutes less than the default time. This is without using the WiFi connection; the battery life would be significantly shorter if you were browsing the web and talking. We also ran a test to see what the battery life would be with the WiFi disabled, and somewhat oddly, we found that this was significantly shorter than with WiFi on, at 6 hours and 25 minutes. We suspect that there may be a bug in the iPhones power management that is making this result shorter; we'll rerun this test when Apple releases their planned software update that will, hopefully, address this issue.
Music Playback (7.78)
Our music playback test involves playing back an album on the phone's built in speakers ripped from CD to MP3 format at a bit rate of 192kbps, looping the playback until the phone runs out of juice and stops playing. In this test, the iPhone kept playing music through the good-sounding speaker on the bottom of the phone for an impressive 10 hours 46 minutes; a very impressive time that's beaten only by the Palm Treo 750 and the Sprint Upstage, which kept playing on speakers for over 25 hours.
But that's not all; when we tested the iPhone using the included headphones, the music kept on coming for an amazing 31 hours and 48 minutes. We use the speaker test for our score (to keep it fair for phones that don't come with headphones), but if we were to apply the same scoring system to this figure, the iPhone would have earned an incredible score of 22.9. Given Apple's experience with designing iPods, this is perhaps no surprise; they have a lot of expertise in building devices like the diminuitive iPod shuffle that can play back music without taking too much battery juice, and the iPhone obviously benefits from this.
| Handset | Audio Playback Battery Life |
Score |
| Apple iPhone | 10 hours 46 minutes | 7.78 |
| Blackberry 8800 | 9 hours 47 Minutes |
7.04 |
| Helio Ocean | 8 Hours 9 Minutes |
5.87 |
| LG Prada | 6 Hours 14 Minutes |
4.49 |
| Nokia N95 | 5 Hours 48 Minutes |
4.08 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 15 Hours 23 Minutes | 11.08 |
Web Browsing (6.26)
Our Web browsing battery test gives a phone a serious workout; it uses a series of linked web pages that refresh every 10 seconds until either the battery runs out, or the phone stops the web browser from loading pages because of low battery power.On the default settings, the iPhone kept on browsing over its EDGE connection for a good long time; 5 hours and 13 minutes. That's not the longest we've seen (that honor belongs to the 9 hours and 52 minutes of the T-Mobile Wing), but it's an impressive score considering the size and brightness of the screen. But it is beaten significantly by the BlackBerry 8800, which kept going for 3 hours and 50 minutes longer than the iPhone. This may be a very important factor if you do a lot of browsing; although the 8800 has a smaller screen, it can keep browsing for much longer, making it more suitable for the user who wants to leave the laptop at home but still read the news or work on the web on the road. We are currently running additional tests on browsing the web over a WiFi connection.
| Handset | Browsing Time Battery Life |
Score |
| Apple iPhone | 5 Hours 13 minutes |
6.26 |
| BlackBerry 8800 | 9 Hours 3 minutes |
10.86 |
| Helio Ocean | 4 hours 19 minutes |
7.7 |
| LG Prada | Failed | 0.0 |
| Nokia N95 | 6 Hours 8 Minutes |
6.8 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 3 Hours 3 Minutes |
3.66 |
Video Playing Time (Not scored)
This isn't part of our normal test (and so we don't provide a score for this), but given the multimedia nature of the iPhone, we had to test it. Playing back a number of TV shows purchased through the iTunes store using the default settijngs for screen brightness, we measured the video battery life of the iPhone at 6 hours and 44 minutes. That's long enough to keep you amused on a cross-country flight and to still leave enough battery power to call when you land and let the family know you are home.
Idle Time (not scored)
We don't test the standby time of cell phones, but Apple claims a standby time of 250 hours, or over 10 days.
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