Preliminary tests show the iPhone SE excels at battery life

Mar 25, 2016 13:26 GMT  ·  By

The recently-launched iPhone SE might be smaller than the majority of modern smartphones, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it cannot cope with most of the tasks that its bigger siblings can easily perform.

Recent battery tests conducted by the Wall Street Journal show that the iPhone SE has even managed to outclass not only the bigger iPhone 6s, but also the Galaxy S7 which was only recently launched by Samsung and supposedly comes with state-of-the-art battery life.

Before anything, if there’s something that’s worth noting is that these tests vary a lot depending on the procedure used to determine battery life and in this case, the WSJ editor says that the stress test was performed with “cycles through websites with uniform screen brightness.”

Battery life figures

According to the resulting figures, the iPhone SE could last for a full 10 hours, while the iPhone 6s and 5s needed to be plugged in to a charger after 8 hours. The Samsung Galaxy S7 ran out of juice after 7 hours.

On paper, the iPhone SE isn’t really impressive, but Apple’s figures surely are unexpected. The device comes with a non-removable 1642 mAh battery which according to Apple provides no less than 50 hours of audio playback and 14 hours of talk time in 3G. As far as standby is concerned, it should offer up to 240 hours.

The 6s, on the other hand, features a 1715 mAh battery, while the Samsung Galaxy S7 is equipped with a non-removable 3,000 mAh unit, so it has double the juice of the iPhone SE.

Without a doubt, the screen size is the one making the difference in this case, but it’s very clear that Apple has managed to do wonders with software optimizations in this case. The iPhone SE, which is very close to what the S7 offers (minus the display, which is an LCD vs. AMOLED), still offers better autonomy despite having a significantly smaller battery.  

Phone Battery Estimated life
iPhone SE 1642 mAh 10 hours
iPhone 6S 1715 mAh 8 hours
Samsung Galaxy S7 3000 mAh 7 hours