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Out of all our tech devices, it's safe to say we use our phones the most. By extension, its battery life is one of the most important factors when considering which phone to buy or upgrade to. So which phone has the best?
To find out which smartphone battery reigns supreme, ZDNET tested 17 phones from six brands including Apple, Samsung, and Google, in two testing methods. The one phone that stood out above the rest in all our battery-life testing was the OnePlus 15, which is why it gets the ZDNET Lab Awards badge.
Also: The best phones you can buy right now
Another phone that impressed us was the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which tied with the OnePlus 15 in general usage testing. Here's the full break down of our findings and how we regularly test smartphones.
How we tested the smartphones
Our two testing methods focused on measuring battery life after video playback and during general use. For the video playback testing (Figure 1), we left a three-hour YouTube video on and tracked the battery percentage over one, two, and three hours.
Phone screen brightness was set to 100%, and auto-brightness and dimming were disabled. In addition, we used Wi-Fi only, notifications were turned off, volume was set to 50%, and the highest refresh rate was turned on.
Test 1: Video playback over three hours
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