The display is the most power-hungry hardware on your Android smartphone. Most smartphones battery life efficiency can be determined by measuring the SOT(screen-on-time). But is it possible to do this in a controlled environment?
If you wanted to get SOT (Screen-on-time) results accurately, you cannot do it unless you do it in an isolated environment testing the actual screen-on-time as people use their phones differently.
For example, some people may browse the web more often than others, perhaps watch videos longer, or even play games for hours that may affect the screen-on-time tests.
To make SOT tests more accurate, we introduce you to our HighOnAndroid SOT Test. This test involves playing YouTube videos continuously until the battery dies. To do this test fairly, we set the display brightness to middle (average brightness) and turn off everything else such as bluetooth/NFC but turn on WiFi. If we do this test on 4G LTE, the results will be skewed as depending on your signal, it may affect the battery life greatly. By eliminating 4G LTE, we are able to get more accurate, consistent results for all smartphones.
For our first HighOnAndroid SOT test, we tested the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the HTC One M9 Android smartphones.
The results?
The results are very interesting, the HTC One M9 died at exactly around 4 hours and 20 minutes while the Galaxy S6 lasted much longer. Due to the Galaxy S6 outlasting my YouTube unboxing playlist, the test ended with Galaxy S6 at 4 hours and 55 minutes plus 11% of battery left.
And of course, don’t forget the Galaxy S6 screen a middle brightness is much brighter than the HTC One M9 at middle brightness, so if the brightness was set more equally to balance out screen differences, the Galaxy S6 should last an hour or two longer than the HTC One M9.
Overall, this tells us that the Galaxy S6 has much more efficient CPU (which it does) and will have longer screen-on-time than the HTC One M9.
We should have more HighOnAndroid SOT tests but in the meanwhile, you can try the same test on your phone to compare how your phone battery fares to the HTC One M9 and Galaxy S6. (Don’t forget to share you results!)
You can use our YouTube HighOnAndroid Unboxing Playlist here or you can use any YouTube playlist but make sure to use one that will be long enough for the test (at least 5 hours).
Also, let me know this DOES NOT test overall battery life abilities but does test the core battery consumption on your phone, which is the display. We will have more tests for testing 4G LTE, bluetooth, and others later on.
*Note – Results for Galaxy S6 Edge should be nearly identical to Galaxy S6 as they share nearly the same hardware.
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