The new Bada flagship, Samsung Wave 3 S8600, is the next smartphone that we made jump through the fiery circles of our battery test. As this was the first Wave to take on our new test, we were quite interested to see how it would fare.

Coming with a 4″ WVGA screen, a 1.4GHz Scorpion CPU and a 1500 mAh battery, you would expect the Wave 3 to be no better than average. However, much to our amazement, it turned out to be the second best performer we have seen. Read more »

The LG Nitro HD for AT&T Wireless is the second smartphone with an HD screen to take a run on our battery test track. The HTC Rezound was the first device we tested with this type of screen and its achievement did not impress. We were thus curious to see how another competitor with similar spec sheet will fare in the same conditions.

At a first glance, the 1830mAh Li-Ion battery of the LG Nitro HD looks Read more »

As the current Windows Phone flagship for Samsung, we were more than curious to put the battery of the Focus S through its paces. The fact that the device has quite a lot in common with the I9100 Galaxy S II made us twice as curious.

The Samsung Focus S is powered by Read more »

We have another Android device with a slide-out QWERTY complete our battery test. Unlike the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro however, the Samsung Captivate Glide for AT&T packs an extra CPU core and an energy efficient, 4″ Super AMOLED screen.

The Captivate Glide is powered by the same 1650mAh battery as the Galaxy S II which we recently tested. With a screen from an older generation and a different CPU (the Captivate Glide packs an NVIDIA Tegra II), we were quite curious to put the droid through its paces. Read more »

As the current flasghip of the company, we were more than interested to put the HTC Rezound battery through its paces. After all, the device packs a monster spec sheet, coupled with some serious multimedia credentials. A battery to match the aforementioned is more than essential – it is simply mandatory.

The Rezound packs a 1620mAh battery – certainly not the largest we’ve seen in an Android device. The battery will have to deal with a dual-core CPU and, most importantly, an HD screen. It surely has a difficult task ahead of it. Read more »

Our LG Optimus 2X got its Android 2.3.4 update at the start of this month and we’ve playing with it ever since. And since the LG former flagship is once again becoming a smartphone many are considering (this time due to the lower price, not top functionality), we thought we might give you a rundown of the improvements we noticed.

The truth is, Gingerbread is by far not as major an update as Froyo was and the Optimus 2X doesn’t feel like a completely different phone after you get it – the overall experience is similar. However, you are free to disagree with us if the updated bits and pieces were just the one bothering you. Read more »

We’ve got the battery tests results of yet another smartphone to share with you. The HTC Sensation XL will try and protect the honor of the company after the rather disappointing performance of the HTC Radar yesterday.

If you are just looking at the specs, you wouldn’t back the Sensation XL to do too greatly. A 1600 mAh battery and a 4.7″ LCD seemingly put the XL at a disadvantage, but maybe it has an ace up its sleeves. Read more »

So far we’ve put five smartphones through our new battery test, but the HTC Radar is the first to fight under the WP flag. The Mango-running smartphone will give us the first indication on how the Microsoft platform fares against its competitors in terms of power efficiency.

The HTC Radar comes with a 1520 mAh battery and a 3.8″ LCD screen, so it had a reasonable fighting chance. In fact it is one of the most favorable battery-to-screen-estate ratios we’ve seen so far in our test. Read more »

True, you have seen us put the Samsung Galaxy S II battery thought its paces before, but we thought you might be interested to see how it does over our new testing course. So here goes the Samsung Galaxy S II battery life test, revisited.

The Android smartphone comes with a 1650 mAh battery and a pretty large 4.3″ screen. Judging by those specs alone, we probably shouldn’t expect the Galaxy S II to top our charts, but the power-efficient Super AMOLED Plus might help it put in a decent performance. Plus, its latest Android update is said to improve battery performance, so who knows. Read more »

Yet another smartphone dared to try its capabilities in our new battery test. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is here and, knowing how many fans the manufacturer has, we are sure many will be interested to know how it did.

The Sony Ericsson battery has 1500 mAh of capacity, which is not quite as impressive as what the Galaxy Note (the only other droid we’ve tested so far) had to offer. It is important to note however, that the device has a screen more than two times smaller than that of the Samsung phablet, so we were pretty interested to see the results. Read more »

It’s episode three of our new battery test and we have the Samsung Galaxy Note starring this time. The phoneblet has a 2500 mAh battery, which is much larger than that of the average smartphone, but it also has a very power-hungry 5.3″ screen.

As a direct result, the Samsung Galaxy Note’s performance in our test was quite unusual. While it got a monstrous score on the telephony part, its web browsing endurance were quite disappointing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Read more »

We are already done with testing the second smartphone to go through our new battery life test. The Apple iPhone 4S did slightly better than the Nokia N9 becoming the new device to beat.

As the blog regulars among you know, the new test involves three individual challenges (video playback, web browsing and voice calls) and a combined, general usage test. Read more »

We just introduced our redesigned battery test and we thought the Nokia N9 would be a great device to try out the new course. The MeeGo flagship seemed to do quite well, though we’ll be able to confirm that only when the results of more devices come out.

Let’s start with the Nokia N9 performance in the three individual components of the test. Read more »

Those SuperAMOLED smartphones can certainly take quite a lot of abuse before their batteries die. Even the Android-powered Samsung I9000 Galaxy S managed to live through good three and a half days of standby and some pretty extensive usage before it switched off. Yeap, the notoriously hard on the batteries Android might not be as bad as it is made out to be.

It didn’t manage to beat the S8500 Wave but the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S certainly managed to push a lot of work on a single charge. Here is what we did with it over the 84 hours from its full charge to its battery going flat. Read more »

Let’s face it, battery tests are long and tedious. They’re also quite hard to time correctly as mobile phone usage varies quite a lot. But that’s not the reason why over at GSMArena we rarely have something specific to say about battery life in our otherwise detailed reviews.

Enter time constraints. The thing is, we rarely have the test units at our disposal long enough to properly test the battery life without interfering with our reviewing routine. In those cases the reviewers try to evaluate the battery performance based on their subjective feeling and experience rather than anything else. Not that can’t be correct. And we don’t pretend it is.

With the HTC HD2 we are using a retail version (unlike all the many pre-production units that come our way) and we had the opportunity to take our time and test the battery life properly.

Read more »