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The best phone battery life used to be a perk you’d have to pay flagship prices for but that’s starting to change. We’ve seen huge improvements in smartphone stamina over the past few years, with handsets in all corners of the market now able to keep working for well over a full day of use.
Here at Expert Reviews, we put dozens upon dozens of smartphones to the test every year, running them all through the same rigorous testing process to accurately judge what kind of battery life they can deliver. You can usually get a good idea of a phone’s stamina by the battery capacity (measured in mAh) but the power efficiency of the processor, as well as the resolution, refresh rate and power efficiency of the display, also have a part to play.
For the other side of the coin, you can check out our list of the fastest charging phones that you can buy right now. Otherwise, read on to see the phones that lasted the longest in our in-house battery life test.
Best phone battery life: How we test
To find out how well your phone performs against its rivals, we’ve combined all the battery scores from the countless smartphone tests we conduct every year into one easy-to-use graph, so you can see which phones are the best battery performers.
To measure a smartphone’s battery life, we run a continuous video-playback test. The video file includes a handful of scenes from Spider-Man 2, encoded to H.264 and looped to a 20-hour length. We use the VLC video player app on either Google Play or the Apple App Store to play the file and record the length of time played on reboot. We also set the phone to aeroplane mode, turn off any automatic brightness and sleep settings and set the screen brightness to a standardised 170cd/m2.
Aeroplane mode switches off all of the phone’s wireless features – naturally, extending battery life – which means that our tests are repeatable and consistent. The big problem with wireless is that signal strength can come and go, which forces the phone to adjust the amount of power that it uses constantly, causing variable results.
Best phone battery life: Results
Samsung absolutely dominated our rankings last year, landing the top spot with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and also having the most devices in our top twenty, with six handsets ranking for the best phone battery life.
Things have shifted a little this year – Samsung now only has five phones in the top twenty – but the Galaxy S24 Ultra has clung on to the crown by its fingertips. The next best is Samsung’s latest flagship, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, which fell just two minutes short of its predecessor’s record, and well within the margin of error of this test. The rest of the S25 series made the cut, too, with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus in fourth place and the Samsung Galaxy S25 in ninth.
There are a couple of surprise inclusions this time around, with the mid-range Google Pixel 9a rocketing up the rankings to third position – making it the cheapest handset in the top five by quite a margin. And for the first time since this article was first published there’s an iPhone in our main table.
We’ve got a full rundown of the iPhone family’s stamina just below, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max has clawed its way up the rankings, landing in twelfth place with an excellent result of 31hrs 12mins. If this is where iPhone power efficiency is heading, we could well be seeing more of an even Android/Apple split in future.
Best phone battery life: iPhone results
While the 16 Pro Max was the only Apple handset to land in the top 20, you can still get decent enough stamina from many of the best iPhones further down the list.
This chart is laid out a little differently, with entries presented in release order, starting with the 2021 iPhone 13 series. Our testing data goes quite a bit farther back – starting with the iPhone 5C from the distant past of 2013 – but for the sake of keeping this chart manageable, we’re focusing here on only the most recent generations.
They may not have quite reached the heights of the Pro Max but the rest of the iPhone 16 series still shows a good leap in power efficiency. The iPhone 16 Pro in particular is a great improvement over the iPhone 15 Pro, lasting for around five hours longer in our testing.
The ageing iPhone SE 3 (2022) was all that Apple fans had in the way of an affordable handset for many years and its battery life was pitiful, lasting less than 12 hours in our test. It’s fantastic, therefore, to see the mid-range iPhone 16e make such great strides in the stamina stakes, lasting a much more palatable 22hrs 38mins.
