Galaxy Note 7 battery life testing reveals handset does better than predecessors

The Galaxy Note 7 proved a tricky phone to run battery life tests on. Long story short, we had to run our custom battery benchmark numerous times until we got reliable results we could show you.

But! The data is now more than conclusive, and it's telling. What is it telling, exactly? Well, there's one key takeaway we can spot right away: the Galaxy Note 7 has the best result in the whole Note family, including daddy Note 5 and granddaddy Note 4. Kids these days!

In fact, if you look at the battery benchmark chart below, you can see that there's been quite a steady progress with each new generation of Samsung's monolithic smartphone. Compared to the venerable Note 4, battery life improvement in the Note 7 comes out to the tune of 12%. From the Note 5, it has increased by around 7%, at least as far as our state-of-the-art battery benchmark system is concerned, that is.

Now, we'd like to put up a big disclaimer sign right here, and it's going to read the following: "These are Exynos variants we're talking about!" As the more tech-inclined among you probably know, the Snapdragon variants Samsung usually sells in the US tend to last a bit less on our test. The same is true here – we tested the Note 7 with Snapdragon 820 as well, and it lasted 7 hours 55 minutes. Whether or not such a difference in performance will also be observed in real life is unclear. But hey, if this is the sort of thing that could ruin your mood for the day, maybe you should think about sorting your priorities out!

Anyway, we've also thrown the iPhone 6s Plus into the mix, which is what we'd consider the Note 7's biggest rival for the next, like, three weeks. The 6s Plus' result is the same as that of the Note 5, so the difference between it and the Note 7 is again 7%.

So now you know, the Galaxy Note 7 doesn't compromise on battery longevity; it actually improves upon the already strong showing by Samsung phones in this category. If you'd like to see the Note 7's battery test result compared against those of other phones, simply use the "Add phone" option at the bottom of the chart.