Which? Magazine Claims iPhone 7 Has 'Poor Battery Life' Compared to Rival Smartphones

[smooth]

As much as I love iPhones, and mine in particular, Which has a good case here. iPhone battery life sucks donkey tailpipe. I'd much rather have a somewhat thicker and heavier iPhone that lasts for several days.

I know you guys don't want to believe me but battery life is not that great on the iPhone. Pretty consistently I have to charge my phone if I want to leave the house at night with my 6s.

I'm not even a heavy user, most of my email is done on my laptop at work, maybe a call or two and a handful of texts, browsing social media during lunch, and the occasional web search when I'm not at my desk. I unplug my phone at 6AM and when I get home at 3:30PM I'm usually around 40-45%. Other than short drive time where I'm not streaming music or anything I am on WiFi. So if I'm just sitting on the couch watching TV/working around the house I have to plug my phone in around 7-8PM just so it doesn't die before I go to bed at 11PM. Now I have to make sure I've got portable chargers on me all the time so I don't have to worry about a dead phone while I'm on the go.

Battery life and thinness are my only complaints about the iPhone. My iPhones 4 and 5 were charged every night and sometimes didn't even last a whole day. My 6+ has always lasted me all-day but it's charged almost every night. I use book-style wallet cases just so my phone seems thicker. I know I am in the minority but I'd gladly have a thicker phone with a more powerful battery.

I am happy with my 6+'s battery for the most part but everyone I know who has a 6 or 6S is not and a couple are upgrading to the 7+ soley for battery life even though they don't want a bigger phone.

 

[TallManNY]

Fascinating. The Android Phones must not be hitting those cores hard during phone calls. So they are getting basic efficiency levels close to the iPhone while having access to a much larger battery. Good for them.

If you have battery issues on your iPhone, do yourself a favor and buy the Apple battery case. It is plenty of extra juice and it feels great in the hand. The bump in the back fits nicely in the palm. Personally, I'm connected to wifi at home and work, so I easily get through the day if I have a full charge in the morning. And the small battery in the iPhone recharges so quickly, I can top off a significant amount with just 20 minutes of charging time.

 

[JimmyHook]

The Guardian just quoted these numbers without independent tests. EVERY other major tech blog got better results with iPhone 7. Me thinks this is a paid hit job

 

[-Markus-]

My iPhone7 128GB I need to recharge atleast on time each day. Normal battery time is 18 hours (using it roughly 5-6 h a day).

 

[chr1s60]

Lots of ADULTS still use their phones to make calls, myself included. Probably 2-3 hours a day on average, and yes, the iPhone's battery drops like a rock when on phone calls - always has. Some people do things like attend meetings, talk to colleagues, chat with their spouse/family, etc.

If you don't fall into this category and don't understand why people make phone calls, then enjoy your time catching Pokemon and snapchatting and doing whatever other ridiculous things people are into these days.

Gotta say I have had a much different experience than you on phone calls. I find that my battery drops some while on a call, but to say it drops like a rock is ridiculous. I can talk for an hour straight and notice very little battery drain. In fact I did that just yesterday. Perhaps with facetime or something like that it will drop fast but I see very little drain on this iPhone or any of the other 7 iPhones I have had and still remember.

I also enjoy your assumption that people aren't adults if they don't use the phone feature. Perhaps some people don't understand why people use email, text messaging, and the internet sometimes instead of calling.

 

[formerpc]

This article should be about the iPhone 7 Plus and it's battery life which is terrible. The phone only lasts about 6 hours with little web browsing and app usage. Everything is turned off, background app refresh, location services.

What the heck are you talking about? My 7 Plus, after moderate usage during the day, is still at 70% when I go home from work and powers through the rest of the day until I go to bed, where it's usually 20-30%.

 

[69Mustang]

Didn't the article note that the test was comparing the 7 and competitor's larger sized phones? It's kind of like noting that a car with a 12 gallon tank (even if it gets 30mpg) can't go as far as truck with a 30 gallon tank (forget about the fact that it gets just 15mpg). And as others have noted, testing 3G phone service seems a bit out of date today, knowing that chips have been updated and designed to be more efficient at LTE service, not 3G. But really, this just comes down to comparing Apple to watermelon and realizing that a smaller battery will provide less usable time.

You may have misinterpreted what you read. Their competitors larger sized phones (5.5") were not tested. The phones that got tested were larger than the iPhone 7. It's immaterial though. The same flagship phones are used in pretty much every comparison. Don't forget, the 4.7" screen size isn't the size of the iPhone. Dimensionally, they're all pretty close.

There's no need to excuse the results. There also would have been no need to laud the results had the iPhone come out on top. Battery life is always a YMMV situation. For some it's great, for others it's terrible, and then there's a whole lot of people in between.

 

[Chaos123x]

Do these phones have headphone jacks?

Do the iPhone's really need to be slimmer? They are already slippery enough being so slim and smooth. I prefer a headphone jack and a bigger battery to any of the "new" gimmick features.

 

[ventmore]

As a GS7 Edge user for two months before the iPhone 7, these results seem totally bogus. My GS7 would be down to ~70% before I even left the house at 8 or 9am and would drain between 10-20% every hour or two. When I would get home from work I would have to charge it, or it would be dead by 6pm.

You sir, are clearly a lying Apple fanboy!

 

[trims]

Ive favors thinness over functionality. This is an ongoing phenomena.

Hands up who would like an iPhone 7 Pro? 2mm thicker, no turret on the back, and bigger battery to last all day.

 

[The1Odin]

@ https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/03/which-magazine-iphone-7-has-poor-battery-life/

Big number, no context.

3G speed comparison? Why not LTE? Why not 4G. This seems like a typical android fanboy comparison where the reviewer looks at an inconsequential feature and makes it the distracting focus.

Cell phone companies are at least two generations ahead of 3G. Two entire generations. 3G(outdated) > 4G > LTE (long term evolution) and then there are LTE categories! This article is pointless clickbate, from an incompetent reviewer. I miss the days of anadtech.com and arstechnica.com. Those were the best reviewers out there.

 

[Moccasin]

The Guardian makes some real nit-picking points in the review. Fluff caught in the antenna bands? What does this guy keep in his pockets? One almost might think they resented the Telegraph getting a review unit, whereas the Guardian did not.

The Guardian used to be a little too sycophantic towards Apple when Charles Arthur was their tech editor, which undermined their credibility somewhat and led to some truly awful comments below the line. Under Samuel Gibbs, it seems to have gone too far the other way and, apparently, the lack of review units was due to them giving a particularly bad review in the past. Gibbs or his moderators seems to be very touchy about any criticism too, with some fair comments deleted unnecessarily.

To be fair to Gibbs, he did say "The Taptic Engine as a whole, for notifications and general feedback, such as the little taps as you scroll through the timer’s wheel like notches on something mechanical, is excellent. It is genuinely the best thing Apple has created in years"

I do wonder whether reviewers take account of the iPhone's tendency to have lower battery life in the first day or two after setup as the device finishes background processes. That said, I don't know how much effect that has on battery life anyway!

For my part, I find the 7's battery life noticeably better than the 6s.

 

[benx1111]

4 pages with comments and nobody have iphone 7. I used this phone from 2 weeks and the battery is great and improved.

 

[a.gomez]

Nothing to do with size. My old z3 compact test phone had amazing battery life. Apple always had this problem. Better now- but the (some) competition has been ahead for some time now.

 

[automactic]

I was really curious about which magazine, so that's why I read the article

 

[mark-vdw]

https://sixcolors.com/post/2015/01/battery-life-apples-solving-for-x/

Apple puts a battery life target first and then makes the battery just as big as it needs to be for that, but not bigger. What the competition has probably figured out is that it's not hard to just have better battery life than the equivalent Apple product, and there's plenty of customers who want better than the "average" battery life that Apple targets.

Honestly, I can understand that Apple keeps the battery life on the regular iPhone at an average 12h, but I would expect them to give the Plus model a much longer battery life at 48h or so.

 

[barkomatic]

Who makes phone calls any more? The iPhone 7 only loses badly on battery life while making phone calls. Using Wifi for internet use, it's neck and neck, and something people wouldn't notice.

It's an article with a misleading headline to get the anti-Apple people riled up and feeling superior. It means nothing in real life.

I feel like this is obvious, but many people make phone calls every day for business and personal reasons and will continue to do so for quite some time. For more involved issues, a phone conversation is still the most efficient way to communicate.

Apple needs to knock off the constant pursuit of unnecessary and unneeded thinness and improve the battery.

 

[The1Odin]

Ridiculously disingenuous comparison.

Exactly!

I didn't even know the iPhone could do 3G! An honest review looks at modern technology like LTE and secondarily 4G. To go all the way back to 3G is a major red flag.

 

[Stella]

It would help if the iPhone had fast charging.. battery life wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Apple want smaller / thinner - so battery capacity takes a hit.

 

[thekeyring]

Oh okay, I'll upgrade to an HTC then, and convince all my friends with iPhones and Galaxy phones to switch as well.

 

[Stella]

Exactly!

I didn't even know the iPhone could do 3G! An honest review looks at modern technology like LTE and secondarily 4G. To go all the way back to 3G is a major red flag.

My iPhone drops down to 3G if there isn't good enough reception 4G reception..

 

[yegon]

This article should be about the iPhone 7 Plus and it's battery life which is terrible. The phone only lasts about 6 hours with little web browsing and app usage. Everything is turned off, background app refresh, location services.

Joke post?

 

[Saipher]

This is a silly comparison at best. Seeing how long a smartphone will last without taking into account the phone's battery capacity does not reflect the true "capacity" of said smartphone. The correct thing would be to do a battery capacity to battery life ratio and then comparing the different smartphones. This would insure an apples to apples comparison. I could have any phone attached to a huge battery last for days, even weeks, without needing to recharge, and claim it has the best "battery life" but how convinient would that be?

 

[AppleWarMachine]

but it's Apple best iPhone/battery yet

 

[groovyd]

gotta come up with something to try to slow down sales of the competition as your own team's phones are being frantically redesigned not to explode on contact