The Best of Android: Mid-2020 — Which phone has the best battery life?

Battery life is integral to a smartphone’s user experience. Devices in 2020 are coming with big, high-resolution displays, many cameras, and high-powered processors. There are more features to power than ever before. You can’t play with all the cool stuff if the battery dies early!

As part of our Best of Android: Mid-2020 awards, today we’re analyzing the smartphones with the best battery life according to our objective testing. We’ll compare and analyze the finalists and announce the battery life king!

Editor’s note: If you’re wondering why your favorite phone isn’t on this list, keep in mind only phones released in the first half of 2020 are here. 2019 phones and phones released after H1 2020 are not eligible.

What and why we test

We’re always testing battery life for our reviews, and so we have a large database of battery life test results. This helps us objectively evaluate and compare smartphones’ battery experiences for you. To do this, one needs to have a fair and repeatable way of testing battery life. Here’s ours:

• Charge the phone to 100%
• Set the display to 200cd/m2 brightness (simulating normal indoor use)
• Open our custom battery app
• Let it run a test until exhaustion

It’s a fairly simple yet effective test that simulates performance-heavy applications like photo-processing and gaming. The myriad of tests run in a loop until the phone runs out of juice. It’s a pretty brutal test and serves as a good worst-case scenario for battery life. The longer a phone can run the tests for, the better the real-world battery life will be.

The results

The final test results are interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, out of the three devices with 5,000mAh batteries, only one of them made it into the top five. Even then, it was extremely close between it and the runners up. This shows that battery size alone does not mean everything. Hardware combinations and software optimizations play a huge part in the overall picture. Motorola’s Edge Plus, for example,  finishes tenth despite its large 5,000mAh battery. This is likely down to its 90Hz display, Snapdragon 865 chipset, and perhaps less-optimized software.

There are a few general trends worth noting. The first is that Chinese brands tend to do very well, due in part to their take on Android. Huawei and Xiaomi, for example, are known for aggressive software optimizations to prolong battery life. So it’s not surprising to see all three of this year’s P40 flagships in our top 10. Secondly, the very best smartphones now offer over five hours of screen-on time even under heavy use, which is very impressive. All but the OnePlus 8 Pro, with its 120Hz display, break the four-hour mark.

The best 2020 handsets offer more than five hours of very heavy use.

With that in mind, none of the top five phones in our results sport 120Hz displays — only 60Hz or 90Hz. Those very high refresh rate displays consume a lot of juice. However, all of the devices in the top six come with flagship processors. The LG Velvet, which came seventh, has a mid-range Snapdragon 765G chip and a 60Hz display. Both of these use less power than its competitors, suggesting that it should have placed higher. In the end though, the Velvet finishes lower than the V60 ThinQ, which shares the same software but packs in a bigger battery. Ultimately, it’s pretty tough to say which phones last the longest by simply looking at a spec sheet.

Continue reading: Snapdragon 865 vs Snapdragon 765G

Charging speed is the other half of the battery equation. Smartphone charging speeds have significantly improved over the past five years and companies advertise quick charging tech as much as battery size these days. We test charging speed with every review we publish, and so we’ve seen the progression first-hand. The graphs below show the phones with the fastest charging speeds by time and also ranked in mAh per minute. In other words, this reflects how fast the charging technology fills up a battery.