Nokia N81 8GB Cell Phone Review - Battery Life
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Alfredo Padilla Published on December 27, 2007 Comment on this |
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Call Time (6.50)
To test battery performance while on a call we make a phone call to the Nokia N81 using Skype, pipe an audio book over the connection, and then time how long it takes for the battery to run out. The Nokia N81 lasted 5 hours 25 minutes in our call test. This is above average for a cell phone, you can see below that only the Sidekick LX and its huge battery put up better performance. We were quite happy with how well the Nokia N81 did in this test.
| Cell Phone | Talk Time | Score |
| Nokia N81 8GB | 5 hours 25 mins | 6.50 |
| Nokia N95 w/ US 3G | 3 hours 43 mins | 4.44 |
| Sidekick LX | 5 hours 36 mins | 6.72 |
| BlackBerry Pearl 8130 | 4 hours 41 mins | 5.62 |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 4 hours 5 mins | 4.90 |
| LG Venus | 3 hours 19 mins | 3.98 |
Music Playback (3.11)
To test music playback time we set an album to play repeatedly with the volume turned up to maximum and time how long the phone can last. The Nokia N81 lasted 4 hours 19 minutes in our music playback test, which is not very impressive. We were actually surprised to see it get a lower score than on the talk time test as most phones show the opposite pattern. That being said the N81 pair of very loud speakers may have something to do with this poor performance. You will likely get better battery performance if you turn the volume down and use headphones instead of the speakers. You can see below that the Nokia N95, which also has high performance speakers, also put up a poor score in this test.
| Cell Phone | Music Playback Time | Score |
| Nokia N81 8GB | 4 hours 19 mins | 3.11 |
| Nokia N95 w/ US 3G | 4 hours 23 mins | 3.16 |
| Sidekick LX | 10 hours 4 mins | 7.25 |
| BlackBerry Pearl 8130 | 7 hours 10 mins | 5.16 |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 4 hours 28 mins | 3.22 |
| LG Venus | 8 hours 52 mins | 6.38 |
Web Browsing (6.76)
To test battery performance while browsing the web on phones we normally point the browser at a page that is set to refresh every ten minutes. We then ensure the screen stays on and time how long it lasts. With the Nokia N81 we found we couldn't use our test page because the browser just cached each of the pages. That meant that no data was being transferred when the page was refreshed, so the test was not one of battery performance when transferring data but simply how long the phone lasts with the screen on. As such we ran this test manually, browsing to a new unique site roughly every ten seconds. Under these circumstances the Nokia N81 lasted five hours 38 minutes, which is a pretty good time but nowhere near the over nine hours we got in our first run with pages cached. The Nokia N81 is probably helped to this solid score because in the U.S. it uses the more power efficient EDGE network for data. If you are overseas and using 3G on the Nokia N81 you can expect this battery performance to go down significantly.
| Cell Phone | Browsing Time | Score |
| Nokia N81 8GB | 5 hours 38 mins | 6.76 |
| Nokia N95 w/ US 3G | 6 hours 12 mins | 7.44 |
| Sidekick LX | 8 hours 54 mins | 10.68 |
| BlackBerry Pearl 8130 | 4 hours 40 mins | 5.60 |
| T-Mobile Shadow | 3 hours 19 mins | 3.98 |
| LG Venus | 3 hours 23 mins | 4.06 |
Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. Nokia's stated standby time for the N81 is 17 days or 408 hours.
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