Of course, smartphones don’t last hundreds or thousands of hours because they draw much more than 1mA of current from the battery. The more current drawn by your phone, the shorter the length of time the battery lasts. The unique hardware and software inside each smartphone mean that no two are ever alike. This is why simply knowing a battery’s mAh capacity doesn’t give you any beneficial information about the expected battery life at all. The battery powers all the hardware inside your smartphone, from the processor to display and any other features packed into the handset. That much is obvious, but different pieces of hardware suck down more or less juice. Low and mid-range processors, for example, consume less power than their flagship counterparts. Generally speaking, higher performance requires more power. This is often why affordable handsets often have longer battery life than premium phones for any given battery capacity. But as we have seen, even high-end flagships can have very different levels of power consumption. See the situation with Samsung’s Exynos and Snapdragon Galaxy S20 flagships. There are some excellent examples of extra hardware sucking down the battery juice too. The Google Pixel 4 and its Soli radar system is a prime example of a feature that drains much more battery than a handset without it. Including a time-of-flight camera focusing system, more powerful stereo speakers, or a 4K display all impact battery life.
These features make handsets unique, but they come with a price. Manufacturers balance high performance and demanding hardware against all-day battery life, capacity, and costs. The trend in faster refresh rate displays plays a big part in why modern phones consume so much power. Did you know that the 4,300mAh OnePlus 8 with a 90Hz display gets better battery life than the 120Hz OnePlus 8 Pro with its larger 4,510mAh battery? The two phones have otherwise virtually identical specs, highlighting just how much of an effect displays and refresh rates have on battery life. Battery life is not just a hardware consideration either. Smartphone software can also affect battery life by killing off background apps to reduce CPU usage and wakeups. For example, Huawei’s EMUI is notoriously more aggressive in this regard than Samsung’s One UI. Another recent trend complicating the matter of mAh vs battery life is the launch of 5G. 5G modems and radio components require more power than previous generation 4G equivalents, meaning that your battery will not go as far if you’re on a 5G network. Complicating things further, different 5G modems and chipsets drain different levels of power. This may be partially why phones like the LG Velvet and reportedly even the Google Pixel 5 are set to ditch Qualcomm’s power-hungry flagship tier chipset, the Snapdragon 865. Again though, these SoCs have slower peak speeds, so it is another power versus performance trade-off.
However, whether this is a crucial purchasing consideration depends on whether you are actually on a 5G or 4G network. If you are sticking with a 4G tariff for now, then power consumption from these components will not be as high, and battery life should be more in line with previous generations. Again though, this all depends on other hardware. Though a bigger battery can hold much more power, battery backup depends upon how it’s being used by the system. What does that mean? A device having a small battery can last longer if its OS is well optimized as compared to a device with a bigger battery and an unoptimized OS. Of course, how you use your phone adds a whole other layer to the battery life debate.
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