Our iPhone Battery Test Results: How We Test

When we started Wirelessinfo.com, we thought long and hard about battery testing, and how we should test it. Should we enable or disable features like WiFi? Should we ramp up or decrease the screen brightness? After much debate, we decided that what we would do is to use the default settings that the phone came with, on the basis that most users won't change these settings. Some power users might decide to go in and enable or disable settings, but most users will leave most settings where they are. So that is how we decided to test cell phones; at the settings that the phone comes with. Before we do a test, we go into the phone settings and do a settings or factory reset to ensure that the settings are back where they were when the phone came out of the box. So, the decisions that the manufacturers make are critical; if a manufacturer decides to enable a feature that is useful, but which consumes battery power, they will see a shorter battery life. We think that's the most appropriate way to test these things - in the state that they are when they come out of the box.

This is how we test all phones; the iPhone got no special treatment here. It's also how we test the cameras on cell phones; we use the default settings for taking photos and videos.

One of our 4 iPhones being tested for battery life.

What this does mean is that we don't get the same results as the manufacturers get. Apple, for instance, when they ran their tests, disabled a feature called WiFi scanning, which checks for known wireless networks in the areas. But the iPhone comes with this feature enabled out of the box, and we didn't change this in our tests. When the manufacturers do their testing, they are aiming to get the maximum battery life out of their devices. When we do our testing, we are trying to find out what you will get when you take the device out of the box.

Our tests also differ from the manufacturers in how we run the tests; Apple's test for Web browsing on the iPhone looks to involve only a moderate amount of browsing, but our test is a lot more aggressive; we use web pages that refresh every 10 seconds. They only seemed to access 20 web pages an hour; we access about 360. For more details on how we test, look here.

But given the controversy surrounding the iPhone results, we are doing more testing to investigate. We are running our default test on several different iPhones, and we will also be running multiple battery tests with different settings; over the next few days, you will see battery test with different settings enabled. We'll run tests with WiFi scanning disabled, and with the WiFi feature of the iPhone completely turned off to ascertain if this makes a difference to . We'll report all of these test results in the review, providing you with the information you need to make an informed decisions about if the iPhone is right for you.