The times they are a-changin’; our phones are getting smarter and the stats are showing we are making less calls and we’re instead using them more for a wide range of different tasks — web browsing, gaming, multimedia.
One of the areas this impacts most is in the average battery life of modern smartphones. At CNET we strive to determine an average battery life for each phone we use, rather than relying on the manufacturer’s mileage claims based on single purpose usage. For example, it’s one thing to claim that a smartphone can handle over 24 hours of continuous music playback, but it would be very rare for someone to turn off all the phone’s connectivity while listening to music to match these claims. We’re looking to benchmark battery life based on real-world experience.
Below is a very quick survey that we hope will be a major contributor to updating our battery benchmarks. The questions are geared towards smartphone users, but we encourage anyone to answer. This survey won’t give you immediate feedback when you finish, but we’ll be posting the complete results shortly.