Could have been better.
The HTC 10 is a flagship in the true sense of the word. It has premium built, runs on the Snapdragon 820 SoC, has 4GB of RAM, a QHD display, and a 3000 mAh battery. While that last one is pretty much standard for flagships this year, but in our experience 3000 mAh isn’t always ideal. The 1080p display on the OnePlus 3 couldn’t do very well with a 3000 mAh battery, then how will the HTC 10 make do with it? Here’s the answer.
We’ll describe the HTC 10’s battery life based on real world usage, but first, the benchmarks.
Benchmarks: Crunching numbers…
The Geekbench 3 battery life test returns a score of 4146 for the HTC 10, which lasts for 6 hours 54 minutes and 40 seconds on its tests.
Real World Usage: Could have been better…
If you unlock developer mode on the HTC 10, you’ll find that the High Performance mode is turned off by default on the device. If you choose to go with this setting, which we did, for the first day, you can expect about 13 hours worth of battery life from the phone if you use the power saver mode. With this setting, we charged the phone to 100% at 12.30pm. The brightness was then set to 50% for the rest of the day, as we went about our activities.
For the first hour, the phone took a lot of screen on time, draining the battery quite a bit. By 2pm, the battery was down to 75%, because of heavy usage. This included 5 calls, a lot of WhatsApp messages, and nearly an hour of browsing. From 2pm onwards, the phone was then used for navigating on Google Maps, for about 20 minutes, along with a few other emails and texts. This brought the battery down to 65%.
From hereon, the phone was pretty much in idle state, with the occasional email or text message, which were mostly swiped away or deleted instantly. The screen on time was kept to a minimum, till about 5.30pm. At 5.30pm, we used the phone as a mobile hotspot for about 15 minutes, and then took two more calls (10-15 minute long). Add an hour more of browsing to that, with the screen still at 50% brightness. It is worth noting that the automatic brightness was turned on throughout this exercise. At around 8.30pm, the phone fell to about 47% battery.
We then streamed music on the phone for 30 minutes, via headphones, and made one more call. This, along with 5 minutes of using the flashlight, dropped the battery to 15% at 10.43pm. Keeping the phone idle from hereon, we were able to get to midnight, with single digit numbers still remaining.
The next day, we turned the phone to High Performance mode, to ensure the battery is taxed even more. We charged the phone to 100% at 3.30am and left it idle till 1pm. In its idle state, the phone received 4 emails, 2 messages on WhatsApp, and no calls. Surprisingly, the battery was down to 83% at 1pm, which is much higher than we expected.
We proceeded to play a game for 40 minutes, and then a lot of texts on WhatsApp, along with over an hour of browsing, and over 2 hours of streaming music. This brought the phone’s battery down to 40%, at 4.20pm.
Charging: Quick Charge 3.0…
At 4.20pm, we put the phone to charge, with the battery percentage at 40%. By 4.25, it was up to 44%, while it reached 63% at 4.44. We had been using the phone while charging, from 4.30-4.44pm, though. From hereon, there were two email notifications, 8 WhatsApp messages and three calls. The screen was woken up only for the calls, and the phone charged to 97% at 5.31pm.
Between 5.31pm to 11.13pm, we received one call on the phone, and it was mostly kept idle, except for minutes, to take some shots using the camera. At 11.13pm, the HTC 10 was at 63% battery, and we reached midnight comfortably, with over 40% battery to go, after a lot of gaming.
Does this work for you?
Well, flagship class phones do compromise battery life for power and speed, but we think the HTC 10 could have done better. While its 10-12 hour battery life will get you through a work day, you would want to carry a power bank with you. Interestingly, while the LG G5 gave us the same battery life, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge lasted us a few hours more.
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Prasid Banerjee
Trying to explain technology to my parents. Failing miserably. View Full Profile
