As you know we got our hands on the new
Nokia N95 with 3G a couple of days ago and we've been running it through our usual set of battery life tests to see how the combination of battery hungry 3G connectivity and a higher capacity battery are affecting the phone's performance. Yesterday we found that when browsing the web the
N95 with 3G performed about an hour worse than the older N95 that lacks North American 3G and instead uses an EDGE connection. Last night we ran our call time test and found a similar effect.
In our talk time test we make a phone call to the device using Skype and pipe an audio book through the connection to simulate conversation. We ran this test on both the new N95 with 3G and the older N95 at the exact same time. The result was that the N95 using AT&T's 3G network lasted 3 hours 43 minutes, while the older N95 using the GSM network lasted 4 hours 41 minutes.
Contrary to what you might expect talk time is actually the most power hungry operation on a 3G device, more so than the web browsing, and this result certainly makes that clear. The N95 with 3G lasted almost 2.5 hours longer browsing the web than making a phone call. In general the older N95's battery performance is right about what we would consider adequate, while the new N95 with 3G's results are a little on the low side. If you're a big talker you may find that the N95 with 3G will crap out on you fairly quickly.
It should be noted though that battery results are fluid and can be effected by many things out of our control. For example in our
original N95 review the test handset, which was different than the one we have now, lasted 5 hours 43 minutes, significantly longer than the result we got last night. This means that these results are best used to make broad comparisons rather than exact comparisons. We feel comfortable saying that the new N95 with 3G has significantly worse battery life than the older N95 using a GSM/EDGE network, but how much worse will depend on a variety of factors. You should also remember that the worse battery results come despite a larger battery in the newer N95. We will continue to run tests over the next few days so keep checking back for more results.
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