This page is dedicated to the HighOnAndroid SOT (Screen-On-Time) Battery Test.
What is HighOnAndroid SOT test?
This is a test that tests your Android smartphone/tablet screen-on-time. The display is usually responsible for a majority of your power consumption so by measuring screen-on-time, you will be able to get a good idea of how long the battery will last.
Many screen-on-time reviews online are pretty much inaccurate as they don’t use controlled environment plus everyone uses their phone differently. Unless we can actual repeat the exact same tests, screen-on-times are meaningless.
So, we created the “HighOnAndroid SOT Test” where the screen is set to middle brightness to 300 lux on light meter (new tests since Dec. 2015 use the light meter to make sure all phones have equal brightness instead of using the phone’s middle brightness) and WiFi turned on but everything else (such as GPS, bluetooth, NFC) turned off. We test the phone on WiFi since having your phone on 4G LTE may skew the test results as 4G LTE can vary greatly on your signal and speeds. We put the phones on airplane mode. For the test, we use the YouTube app to playback videos on 1080P continuously. A 1080P HD YouTube video playback also allows us to test the average CPU time as it requires some HD decoding from the processor, you can consider this somewhat between heavy gaming and light web browser, in essence “an average” of things we do on the phone. And also by streaming YouTube video, we can include internet connection, which is vital to everyday usage. A test without internet connection is useless as that’s like testing a phone that is turned off.
Overall, these screen-on-time results will be slightly higher than real normal usage (we think) but it is definitely a great test to compare phones in a controlled environment.
If you want to do the HighOnAndroid Test on your Android device, simply put your screen brightness to 300 lux, turn off any power saving features (as we are not testing that), turn on Airplane mode, turn off everything except WiFi, and replay a YouTube playlist using the YouTube app (in 1080P HD for quality) that’s long enough to do the test (we used our HighOnAndroid Unboxing Playlist which is around 12 hours long total but you can use any of your favorite YouTube playlists).
HighOnAndroid SOT Test Results
Listed in order of highest-to-lowest SOT(Screen-On-Time)
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (Exynos) – 11 hours 34 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test [KING of SOT]
LG V30 (pre-production) – 10 hours 7 minutes on stock Android 7.1.2 Nougat – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S7(Exynos) – 9 hours 10 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test
Huawei Mate 9(Kirin) – 8 hours 57 minutes – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (Qualcomm) – 8 hours 48 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus (Qualcomm) – 8 hours 47 minutes on stock Android 7.1.2 Nougat – See Test
Pixel – 8 hours 46 minutes on Android 7.1 Nougat – See Test
Pixel XL – 8 hours 16 minutes on Android 7.1 Nougat – See Test
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (Qualcomm) – 8 hours 15 minutes on stock Android 7.1.2 Nougat – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S5(Qualcomm) – 6 hours 50 minutes on stock Lollipop – See Test
Huawei Mate 8(Kirin) – 6 hours 50 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S6(Exynos) – 6 hours 42 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test (Note: Marshmallow has much improved battery life over Lollipop on this device)
Samsung Galaxy Note 5 – 6 hours 38 minutes on stock Android 5.1.1 Lollipop – See Test
LG G6(pre-production) – 6 hours 23 minutes on stock Android 7.0 Nougat – See Test
LG V20 – 6 hours 20 minutes on stock Android 7.0 Nougat – See Test
Huawei P9 – 6 hours 14 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow – See Test
Galaxy Note 4(Qualcomm) – 6 hours 10 minutes on stock Lollipop – See Test, 6 hours 7 minutes on stock Lollipop – See Test
Galaxy Note 3(Qualcomm) – 6 hours 10 minutes on stock Lollipop – See Test
Nexus 6 – 5 hours 53 minutes on stock Android 5.1 Lollipop – See Test
OnePlus One – 5 hours 53 minutes on stock Android 5.0.2 Oxygen firmware – See Test
Nexus 6P – 5 hours 50 minutes on stock Android 6.0.1 firmware – See Test
Nexus 6P – 5 hours 22 minutes on stock Android 7.1 firmware – See Test (After 11 months)
Galaxy Note Edge (Exynos) – 5 hours 28 minutes on stock Android Lollipop – See Test
LG G Flex 2 – 5 hours 25 minutes on stock Android Lollipop – See Test
Samsung Galaxy S6(Exynos) – 5 hours 20 minutes on stock Lollipop (with 5% battery left) – See Test
LG G3 – 5 hours 11 minutes on stock KitKat – See Test
HTC One M9 –4 hours 20 minutes on stock Android 5.0.2 Lollipop – See Test
LG V10 – 4 hours on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop – See Test