LG Chocolate 3 Cell Phone Review - Battery Life

The Chocolate 3's talk time is less than expected, though it performs well enough for music playback and web browsing. For more information about our battery tests see this article.

Call Time (4.8)
In our call test, the Chocolate 3 lasted for 4 hours flat, which is less than almost every other one of our comparison phones, including its own predecessor, and is less than the spec sheet usage time of 4 hours and 30 minutes. 4 hours is a lot of time on the phone, but it can go quickly for a chatty teenager and is almost certainly not enough for the average business user. This isn't too surprising given the Chocolate 3's relatively small battery, but it would be nice if it could at least surpass its predecessor in this area.

Call Time (min)

Music Playback (8.21)
We test music playback battery life by setting the phone to play music continuously through the loudspeaker at full volume, starting with a fully-charged battery. With a music playback time of 11 hours and 24 minutes, the Chocolate 3 does pretty well, beating all of our comparison phones except the Samsung M520. Since the Chocolate 3 is touted as a music-centric phone, this kind of battery life for music playback is good to see, and we only wish it also carried over to call time as well.

Music Playback Time (min)

Web Browsing (5.42)
To test battery life when web browsing, we set the phone's screen to stay on and set the phone to never lock or shut down, if available. We then browse to a site that refreshes every 10 seconds and see how long the battery lasts on a full charge. The Chocolate 3 did very well in this test, lasting 4 hours and 31 minutes - this is almost a full 2 hours more than its predecessor in this same test. Such a dramatic increase in battery life for an activity like web browsing that requires the screen to be backlit for the duration is a wonderful improvement that we'd love to see in every phone from generation to generation.

Web Browsing Time (min)

Idle Time unscored
In order to get our reviews out in a timely manner, we don't fully test idle time since this can be from several days at the low end to weeks at the high end.  The Chocolate 3's spec sheet states that standby time will be up to 350 hours. Idle time can vary a great deal and depends on a number of factors, with network connection strength being the primary one.  The closer your phone is to a cell tower, the less energy it must expend to maintain the connection. Of course, leaving the Bluetooth radio on will help drain the battery more during idle as well. We observed the Chocolate 3 to maintain its charge well as we completed our review, and wouldn't expect you to have any problem with it in this area.