
Have you ever felt your cell phone vibrate and
pulled it out of your pocket, expecting to to see a text or e-mail
message, only to see a low-battery warning instead? Surely, you've
uttered the dreaded words, "My phone is dying, so I have to say this
fast!"
It may be time to consider investing in a phone with better battery life.
I don’t know about you, but the idea of carrying an extra battery or
charger around, or even strapping a battery case to my phone is not all
that appealing. But I’m realistic. Smartphones, with their big touch
screens and fast processors, suck up a lot of power, so I’m not
expecting to make it through the week on a single charge. Still, there’s
no excuse for not being able to make it through the day.
For every phone we review here at PCMag we test continuous talk time,
to measure just how much chatting you can do between charges. Although
talk time doesn’t account for all the other ways we use our phones
throughout the day, it’s still a useful indication of how long you can
expect your battery to last. For most smartphones running on a 3G
network, the average talk time is a little over five hours, which isn't
bad. There are also a good number of phones that fall in the six-hour
range, which is even better. For the phones that support it, we also
measure audio streaming time over 4G LTE, because 4G has proven to be a
major battery suck. Right now, the average streaming time is just under
four hours.
For this list, we’re rounding up phones that delivered at least seven
hours of talk time—some go well beyond that—which should be more than
enough juice to get you from morning to evening without a charge.