The Samsung Galaxy S5 mini matches the looks of the big Galaxy S5 and even most of its features but opts for a smaller display, body and in turn smaller 2,100mAh battery.
The screen of the Galaxy S5 mini is 4.5″ against the 5.1″ of the Galaxy S5 and the resolution is more than two times lower at 720p. The chipset should also be less power-hungry so the 700mAh-less battery should do okay to match the 72 hour endurance rating of the bigger Galaxy S5. But there are a slew of minis to fight as well – let’s see how the Galaxy S5 mini did.
The first of our tests was call endurance – a very important test for any device that has network connectivity (duh). Here the Galaxy S5 mini took home 12 hours and 18 minutes worth of time – decent, if unspectacular. The Galaxy S5 beats it by 9 hours and 2 minutes but the HTC One mini 2 does 2 hours less. Then things start to go down – the Moto G has more than 1 hour on the Galaxy S5 mini, the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact got scores above 20 hours.
Web browsing on the Galaxy S5 mini went on for little over 13 hours. That’s a downright impressive result – in fact the best we’ve seen on any phone we’ve tested and any Super AMOLED device on our list – and almost twice as much as the HTC One mini 2 and close to an hour more than the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and more than the Moto G and LG G2 mini. That’s enough to score you enough online time to fill any downtime situation, granted you have that kind of data lying around.
Finally we come to video playback. Another solid score for the Galaxy S5 mini – 11 hours of screen-on time playing a video at 50% brightness and 10% loudspeaker sound. That’s way more than what the HTC One mini 2 and Moto G managed and a little more than what the LG G2 mini was able to squeeze.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 mini managed about 250 h of stand-by which was the final test to determine the endurance rating you’re going to get. Coupled with all three scores we covered above the Galaxy S5 mini get a superb 72 hour endurance rating. In case you’re not familiar with our battery test the endurance rating is the number of hours you can get before you’d need a charger if you perform an hour of calling, browsing and video-watching daily. You can find all the details on our test and a customizable tablet of results in our battery tool page.
While the Samsung Galaxy S5 mini wasn’t able to get more than 11-12 hours of anything and didn’t touch the above-20-hour call times of some of its rivals it didn’t fall lower than 10 hours, which really made the battery life great. And that’s without ever going into Ultra Power Saving mode.
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