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The interesting video from Samsung’s German arm hit YouTube yesterday. It’s a series of “battery tests” for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge up against the HTC 10, iPhone 6S, Huawei P9, Sony Xperia X, and LG G5.
If you don’t want to be spoiled, hit the video above. But you had to guess it — Samsung’s phones won in their own test video. They probably wouldn’t publish them otherwise. Their phones each exceed 10 hours with some nice room to spare, with no others being able to reach 9 hours.
But there are a couple of interesting things to note. For starters, the “test” consists of an ongoing video (or maybe even GIF) of a blue rabbit banging on a yellow drum. This is important to note because if it is a video, it’s likely running at a resolution so low that none of these phones are breaking a sweat. If it’s a GIF, CPU overhead is even lower.
Beyond that, the lack of any other action during this test makes it hard to judge how the phones perform based on “typical” usage. We’re not sure anyone’s going around watching a video for 10 hours a day. How do things change when the CPU has to ramp up to full? When the Bluetooth, WiFi, or GPS radios are active? When apps are being moved in and out of memory? When the GPU has to run graphic-intensive games for 10 minutes?
And do we know whether these phones have their battery saver options enabled or not? Oh, and how does Samsung explain that the Galaxy S7’s 3,000mAh battery can’t last as long as the Galaxy S7 Edge’s 3,600mAh pack?
See what we mean? Samsung could have skewed these results any which way they wanted (they claim all devices were tested on equal terms), and unless they’re willing to tell us their criteria (we’ll ask, but we reckon they won’t) we’d say to take these results with a pinch of salt. In either case, Samsung technically made their battery last 10 hours, even if the usage scenario isn’t at all realistic. What’s the best battery life you’ve gotten on your Samsung Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge?
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