We’re talking a whopping 15 hours and 30 minutes of web surfing over 5G, which blows away everything else. In fact, Asus may be the phone maker who had the best showing of anyone when it comes to battery life. While the ROG Phone 6 heads our list of the longest lasting phones, the company’s flagship Asus Zenfone 9 rounds out the top five finishers on our battery test. In between, we have a flagship phone from Apple as well as budget devices from Motorola and OnePlus. It just goes to show you that any type of phone — from Apple’s most feature-packed flagship devices to some under-the-radar budget offerings — can deliver all-day battery life. Here’s a closer look at the phones that impressed us with their battery performance.
Top 5 longest-lasting phones of 2022
Tom’s Guide battery test: How we evaluate phones
Every smartphone we review goes through the same array of tests to measure its performance, display, cameras and — most relevant to our purposes here — battery life and charging speed. You can read more about the complete process in our guide on how Tom’s Guide tests and reviews smartphones. Our battery test is a proprietary test where we use a light meter to set each phone’s display at 150 nits. We then run a script on the phone that forces it to surf the web continuously over cellular — we disable the phone’s wi-fi connectivity when we run our test — and time how long it takes for a fully-charged phone to run out of power. Because most phones these days offer 5G connectivity, we run our tests over a 5G network. By default, we use T-Mobile’s network, though in cases where we review a phone tied to a specific carrier’s network, we’ll stipulate which one we’re using. We run multiple tests and use an average of the results for our battery life time. When possible, we also run tests at different display refresh rates when a phone offers that capability. Unless otherwise specified, the battery test results cited will reflect a phone’s best refresh rate, since we figure that’s the setting you’ll want when using the phone in daily use. The average smartphone runs out of power in a little less than 10 hours of continuous web surfing. Any time over 11 hours is excellent, and the phones with the best battery life can hold out for 11.5 hours or longer. Our best phone battery life page shows the 15 longest-lasting phones we’ve tested in the last 18 months, since many phones remain on the market that long. However, to wrap up the year, we’re concentrating solely on phones that came out in 2022 that impressed us with their longevity.
Best phone battery life of 2022: Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
The ROG Phone 6 Pro blew away the other phones we tested in 2022, lasting an astound 15.5 hours on our battery test. To put that number in context, the next closest competitor — Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro Max — was nearly 2 hours behind the ROG Phone 6’ lengthy battery life. We should note that we got that number with the adaptive display rate feature turned on. Because the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro is a gaming-centric phone, its refresh rate can spike all the way up to 167Hz. Most phones, like the standard iPhone 14 are locked at 60Hz, while many other handset with fast-refreshing displays top out at 120Hz. The ROG Phone 6 blows by that in the name of more immersive gaming on its 6.8-inch AMOLED screen. Faster refresh rates also tend to drain phone batteries more quickly — a trend we’ve noticed when testing some phones that can scale up their refresh rates. That’s clearly not a concern with the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro, which benefits from the power management features in the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset that drives the phone. It’s not insignificant that the ROG Phone 6 Pro runs on that particular Qualcomm silicon, which improved upon the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 found in top Android phones released earlier in the year. As powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 proved to be, we noticed that phones running that particular chipset didn’t fare as well in our battery test. The only Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phone to break the 11-hour mark on our battery test was the OnePlus 10 Pro, while a pair of Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 devices (both from Asus) fared better. We hope that trend continues in 2023 with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which is said to bolster CPU power efficency by 40% over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Other features help position the ROG Phone 6 Pro as one of the best gaming phone options, such as its fantastic speakers and immersive haptic engine. But we keep focusing on that battery life test result which translates to never having to stop a marathon gaming session because your phone is running out of power.
Best of the rest: The iPhone 14 Pro Max leads the way
The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro’s result was the best we had seen since the Zenfone 3 Zoom five years ago. But it shouldn’t completely overshadow some of the results we recorded when battery testing in 2022 — especially since the runner-up in the long-lasting phone race ranks as the best phone overall to come out this year. That would be the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which offers Apple fans the best-performing silicon we’ve tested, vastly improved cameras and a bold new Dynamic Island feature that replaces the divisive notch on iPhone displays. The iPhone 14 Pro Max posted the best result of any iPhone ever on our test, lasting for 13 hours and 39 minutes. That was 11% longer than the iPhone 13 Pro Max, which remains on our best phone battery life list a year after its release. (Remember, phones can stay on that list for 18 months if they post a strong enough time.) The iPhone 14 Pro Max made that jump even though its 4,323 mAh battery capacity is slightly smaller than the 4,352 mAh cell powering its predecessor, according to teardowns. That speaks to the efficiency of Apple’s A16 Bionic chip. While the $999 ROG Phone 6 Pro and $1,099 iPhone 14 Pro Max are on the pricey end of the smartphone market, two other top performers on our battery life test prove you don’t need to spend big bucks for a long-lasting phone. The 2022 edition of the Moto G Power may not have lasted as long as previous releases in Motorola’s G Series, but its 13 hour and 15 minute time still topped all but two other phones we tested this past year. And you can get Motorola’s budget phone for less than $200. The OnePlus Nord N300 is a little more expensive at $228, but it lasts just about as long as the latest Moto G Power. Alas, battery life is just about the only thing that impressed us with this disappointing low-end phone, especially since the inexpensive OnePlus Nord N20 also lasts a long time on a charge while also offering providing solid performance and an eye-catching design. OnePlus knows how to build cheap, long-lasting phones. Rounding out the five longest-lasting phones of the year is the other Asus model, the Zenfone 9. What’s notable about this device, besides its $699 price, is the fact that it’s so compact at 5.8 x 2.7 x 0.4 inches. Small phones may be out of favor, but the Zenfone 9 proves you don’t have to sacrifice battery life if you do prefer smaller devices.
Phone battery life outlook
Looking ahead to the coming year, we’ve already touched on our hopes that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will mean more efficient power usage by the best Android phones. Similarly, we’ve got an eye toward Apple’s iPhone 15 release in the fall. While the iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone 14 Plus both impressed with their battery life, Apple’s smaller 6.1-inch handsets did not — that’s an area we hope to see improved once Apple’s next flagships come out. Another phone maker who needs to better address battery life is Google, whose top performing phone on our test barely cleared 8 hours. This has been a problem with Google phones for a while now so we hope that whatever Tensor silicon succeeds the current Tensor G2 chipset pays attention to power consumption. Otherwise, it’s been an impressive year for phone battery life with devices from every price range landing on our list. Here’s hoping that trend continues with future phone releases.
