Nexus 4 Battery Life Not So Good

As we all anxiously await the November 13th arrival of the Nexus 4, I’m sure a lot of you are concerned how the battery life will fare. Well, early results aren’t very good. Based on recent unbiased and fairly scientific test results from AnandTech, the battery life on one of the most anticipated devices this fall will leave something to be desired. AnandTech did admit that they have yet to run through their entire battery life suite, but they did fully test, record, and publish the results of the most important category. 

This latest test is a bit different than their previous tests, if you’re familiar with their methods. AnandTech changed their battery tests to better map ‘typical’ smartphone usage these days. This new method consisted of regularly loading web pages at a fixed interval until the battery died with all displays calibrated to 200 nits. As mentioned, their old test method was tweaked to more closely mimic ‘typical’ smartphone usage and involved changes to the network activity and CPU load. In the end, what they ended up with, was a very good representation of constant, heavy usage beyond simple browsing.

The results were not very favorable for those hoping for nice, long sessions on a single charge. Seeing as its not even an LTE device, I’d say that these results are pretty bad, even finishing slightly below the LTE-enabled Galaxy S III (my initial estimate was within seven minutes as per my response in the Comments). Granted it does have a quad-core processor, but still, I would’ve liked to have seen those processors used a little more efficiently.

One caveat however, is that chances are it may outperform your current device. My device isn’t even on the graph, so I’m assuming it’s well below these results. Also, given a better, bigger screen and more horsepower under the hood, LG and Google managed to increase the battery life by almost 25% over the Galaxy Nexus. That’s a very good achievement in and of itself given the bump in specs.

The only real question left to ask is, “How important is battery life to you?” Do any of the other devices that fared better than the Nexus 4 appeal to you? As always, as consumers, we’ll have to deal with tradeoffs and make decisions accordingly. I’m sure everyone is different. Fortunately, I’m within arm’s reach of a charger about 99% of the time in a normal day so it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me.

source: AnandTech