Battery Life Drain Test Samsung S22 Ultra vs S21 / iPhone 13 Pro Max / Pixel 6 Pro / Xiaomi 12 Pro

All right, let’s decide once and for all in 2022 which smartphone company gives you the best battery life.

We’ve got five phones here. The brand new Samsung galaxy s 22 ultras, the iPhone 13 pro max, the google pixel 6 pro, and then Xiaomi’s latest flagship, the 12 pro, and then just next to that s22 ultra. I’ve also added in last year’s s21 ultra, so we’ll be able to see not just if Samsung’s managed to beat the competition, but also how much they’ve improved by and to make sure that this test is 100 fair for every phone; I’ve bought us a brand new version of it. 

Hence, everything has 100 battery health and is pretty representative of what you would get if you went into a shop and bought one of these now. So all the phones are calibrated in terms of brightness. Let’s unplug the charges and start that timer.

Battery Life Drain Test

These tests if a phone can get five hours of screen on time that’s a solid six hours are good seven hours is great. If a phone can pass eight hours, then that is power-user level right there. I want to stress that this is a very important battery test because you might know that for some time now, Samsung has been having quite a bit of trouble with their own in-house Exynos chipsets year after year. They’ve just lagged in terms of both performance and battery efficiency. Still, this time the Exynos 2200 chip that’s sitting inside this s22 in front of us is meant to be the savior. If we check the battery percentages so far, well, the pixel is winning. 

Would you look at a phone that was pretty heavily criticized for not having a great battery? Hence, fingers crossed that the result changes while we wait for it.

I do want to mention a few things that Samsung has done with this next generation s22 ultra, which they’re saying will elevate it to another level of battery life so for starters because this phone is more intelligent. It can now predict based on what you’re doing with your phone when you’re not going to need your wi-fi and signal and then temporarily, for short periods of time, put them to sleep without you realizing. But it’s not just that they’ve also used a very special display on this phone; you can see how sometimes these screens are flickering quite a lot other times less. So, that’s because each phone on this table is using it protect that lets their screens refresh at the minimum refresh rate that they need to display the content you’re looking at, which saves power and while last year’s Samsung the iPhone and the pixel can all go from 120 hertz to as low as 10 hertz the s22 ultra as well as Xiaomi’s mi 12 pro uses a new generation of this technology that can take them as low as one hertz. I’ve made sure to include some static bits in this test so we will get to see how much of a difference it’s creating so far though looking at the battery percentages now, it’s not looking great. The iPhone is currently leading the pack that in itself doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been using a 13 pro max since the day it came out; the battery is life-changing on that thing, but then interestingly, that’s being trailed by not the s22 ultra but, in fact, the s21 ultra there’s still plenty of time for that to change. But it is still surprising if we drop all the battery capacities on-screen now, you can see that the s22 ultra has the same size battery as their last phone, and so if you pair that with what should be a bunch of optimizations, then it is a little fishy. 

It’s not impossible that there might be a software update in the future that helps it out, but you’ve got to remember that the time when the most number of people are going to buy this thing is, so you need to know how good it is. Now not after you’ve received it b this is the state that Samsung has given it to reviewers for testing, so either they’ve got a pr team that needs a serious looking at, or it’s not going to get much better than this that’s c. The other thing in my testing is that battery life does not tend to improve with updates the battery life of an s21 ultra, for example, is not better now than it was at launch last year. 

Anyways as you can see, we’re currently recording some 4k video on each phone right now. This is probably the most demanding thing you can do on a smartphone; you’re using just about every component at the same time. So you will notice the batteries start to fall a little faster and then straight from there, on each and load it into adobe premiere a video editing program with the plan being to make a minor adjustment to the file and then re-export a full version of it to kill the phones all over again and if I hit that export button, you’ll notice that the iPhone finishes the render way faster than any other phone followed by last year’s s21 ultra. We are just approaching the three-hour mark, by the way, and the primary message that I actually want to get through in this is that I am just glad that none of these phones are flagging. At this point, I remember when I used to make these tests like four years ago, and pretty much no phone would ever hit six hours. So progress is being made, which is important because I feel like as our phones have gotten more and more useful, we are increasingly offloading more and more tasks that would have been done using other gadgets onto them. Our smartphones are now our primary navigation devices, our content machines are banking platforms, and so it’s not just that we use them more and therefore we need them to last longer, but it would also be a bigger problem than ever. 

If they suddenly died randomly in the middle of the day, one thing to also keep in mind for this test is that I’ve made sure that all hones are on their default settings. I think it’s the fairest way to do it because it’s probably what 95 percent of people will use them on but just bear in mind that it does mean different things for each phone; they are all matched in terms of having a lighter colored wallpaper removing the sim card from each as that can create a whole load of extra variables and keeping them on light mode instead of dark mode. But where they differ is that both the pixel and the iPhone run a much higher screen resolution than the Samsung’s in the Xiaomi, and neither of those two phones gives you the ability to lower it. 

That said, it can’t be that much of a disadvantage was shown that the iPhone is now leading by more than 10 percentage points one thing I do always notice about the iPhone in these tests is that even though Apple has trimmed down those black screen borders since the original iPhone 10, they do still look pretty chunky up against all these full screens near bezel-less Androids. It doesn’t affect the screen size itself, though, so as far as batteries are concerned, it shouldn’t have an impact. I can’t believe I tried to play this game on five phones at once. Okay, so now that all phones are well beyond the five hours required to, I guess, pass this test, I’m just gonna start fast-forwarding, so we can get to the results. 

It does seem, though, at this point that the s21 ultra is going to beat the s22 ultra, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how this could be possible; a couple of thoughts on the s pen that you now get inside this new s22 ultra could be sipping some extra power two it could be that this new Exynos chip even though it might be more efficient for some tasks may actually use more energy when being pushed to its peak level of performance because that peak is higher than before three. It’s also possible that the thermals inside this new phone aren’t as good. If the phone is getting hotter, its battery will drain faster. Finally, it could be some level of software optimization unlikely given that with past Samsung phones, how they’ve been at launch is how they’ve tended to stay but possible okay. The pixel is dead so is the Xiaomi. 

Okay, let’s do a bit of a mass extinction right now. Let’s sweep through the entire test and get straight to which phone lasted for how long. Okay, so in the fifth position is the google pixel 6 pros. It’s a very strong performance for last a place with a time of seven hours and six minutes, and so even though it has lost this test unless you’re an extreme power user. I don’t think the battery should be a reason to not consider this phone. Then in fourth place, we have the Xiaomi 12 pro, which I’ve not got around to making a full video about, but it is an excellent refinement from last year’s mi 11. It definitely looks a lot better, too. Still, yeah, so this phone had a total time of seven hours 34, which puts it is very firmly in the category of excellent battery life is especially given that it has the smallest capacity battery of all the androids on this table then we’ve got the s22 ultra. While I am a little concerned confused why this didn’t outlast its predecessor. If we just put that all aside for a second eight hours and eight minutes is a hell of a lot of screen on time, then so as far as the battery is concerned, I’ve got no hesitation in still recommending it. The s21 ultra wasn’t far ahead at 8 hours 15. So there’s probably not quite enough of a gap to conclusively say that it beats its successor, but at the same time, it is enough to say that it doesn’t lose to it also. 

Side note: This is the first time I’ve had proper hands-on with this phone’s silver variant. Isn’t it just beautiful? Oh, yea!

Then we have the iPhone 13 pro max in the first place. Let me ask you how long you think it lasted 8 hours 30? 9 hours? Nope!! 10 hours 27 minutes. It’s not just better, it is in a whole other league.