These are the smartphones with the best phone battery life based on our tests
Devices with a wide range of prices make up our best phone battery life rankings. Sure, the top three spots are held by a couple of gaming phones and the most expensive iPhone you can buy. But you’ll also find entries that cost less than $300 as well as midrange models that are available for hundreds of dollars less than pricey flagships.
Every phone we review goes through our custom battery test in which we make phones surf the web continuously over 5G until they run out of juice. We set the phone’s screen at 150 nits of brightness to ensure comparable results. And if the phone has a display with a fast refresh rate, we test multiple times with that feature enabled and disabled to get a sense of what kind of battery life you can expect.
The average phone lasts a little less than 10 hours, so anything over the 10-hour mark offers solid battery life. But to earn a place on the best phone battery life list, you need to hit 11.5 hours. Truly, we’re talking about phones that offer the kind of endurance where you’re less reliable on one of our best portable charger picks.
Our current champ, the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, sets a mark for longevity that could stand for a long time, beating last year’s Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro by 3 hours. That’s the third Asus device in our top 15, suggesting the phone maker really puts a premium on battery life.
So does Motorola, which offers the runner-up in our testing, the Motorola Edge Plus (2023). But it’s not just Motorola’s flagship that lasts a long time on a charge. Many budget Moto G phones also appear on this list, proving you don’t need to spend big bucks on long battery life.
Here are all the top performers we’ve tested in the last year-and-a-half.
The best phone battery life in 2023
1.Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate
If you want a phone that lasts a long time on a charge, look no further than the ROG phones from Asus. The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate is the latest Asus device to push our battery test to the limits, holding out for 18.5 hours on a charge. Credit goes to the device’s 6,000 mAh battery as well as the energy efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset that powers the phone. Speedy 65W charging helps you quickly top off that battery.
The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate won’t be available in the US until a few months from now, and we’re not sure what it will cost. European pricing is a hefty €1,399. But the good news is that the cheaper ROG Phone 7 has the same 6,000 mAh battery and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, so it should see similar results on our test.
2.Motorola Edge Plus 2023
We’re never surprised when a Motorola phone does well on our battery test — you’ll find a lot of the phone maker’s devices on this best phone battery life list. Still, the Motorola Edge Plus 2023 raised a few eyebrows with its time of 15 hours and 47 minutes — the second-best result we’ve seen from any device in the last 18 months. We got that result with the phone’s 6.7-inch display set to an automatic refresh rate, meaning that it can scale up to 120Hz as on-screen activity dictates.
But the Edge Plus supports an even higher refresh rate of 165Hz — appealing to gamers who long for immersive graphics. When we locked the phone’s refresh rate at 165Hz, the Motorola Edge Plus still lasted more than 13 hours on our test, so it still would have ranked among the longest-lasting phones we’ve reviewed. The Motorola Edge Plus also sports 68W wired charging to top off its massive 5,100 mAh battery. We weren’t blown away by the charging speed in practice, but that’s one of the few disappointments we experienced when testing this excellent flagship phone.
3.Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
Like its successor, the Asus ROG Phone 6 uses a 6,000 mAh to post an impressive time on our battery test — a mere 15.5 hours in this case. But that time comes with the phone’s adaptive refresh rate turned on, so even refresh rates of 167Hz aren’t enough to put a hit onSmartphone battery life.
When it is time to charge, you won’t have to wait too long to get the ROG Phone 6 Pro’s battery up and running. Thanks to 65W wired charging, just 15 minutes of charging got the drained gaming phone back to 44%.
Built for gamers, the Asus ROG Phone 6 won’t ever run low on battery, even in the midst of a marathon gaming session. But it packs plenty of power for the rest of us as well, when it goes on sale in the next couple months.
4. iPhone 14 Pro Max
We’re used to the Pro Max model in Apple’s iPhone lineup lasting a long time — but not this long. Thanks to a big battery (how big Apple hasn’t said) and the power management features of the 4-nanometer A16 Bionic chipset, the iPhone 14 Pro Max lasts more than 13.5 hours on average. That’s the longest an iPhone has ever held out on a battery test and just another reason we consider the iPhone 14 Pro Max to be the best phone overall (and certainly the best iPhone you can buy).
To put this result in perspective, the iPhone 13 Pro Max was a long-lasting phone; in fact, you’ll find it further down the list. And the iPhone 14 Pro Max topped it by over an hour even though Apple’s new phone added an always-on display you would have guessed would diminish battery life.
It’s not all good news on the power front, as Apple is sticking with 20W wired charging on the iPhone 14 lineup. That means pedestrian charge times when compared to faster-charging flagships. But given how long the iPhone 14 Pro Max lasts on a charge , you won’t run into that disappointment too often.
Battery testing is one part of the tests we run to review phones. All those help us assign ratings to devices in our smartphone reviews, though for the purposes of the best phone batterylife list, our battery test is the only result affecting rankings.