Best phone battery life 2024: The longest-lasting smartphones ranked

With all the ways that we rely on our smartphones day to day, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting the best phone battery life when deciding on your next purchase. We’ve seen huge improvements in stamina over the past few years, with phones in all corners of the market now able to keep charge for well over a full day of use.

Here at Expert Reviews, we put dozens upon dozens of smartphones to the test every year, running them all through the same rigorous testing process to accurately judge what kind of battery life they can deliver. You can usually get a good idea of a phone’s stamina by the battery capacity (measured in mAh) but the power efficiency of the processor, as well as the resolution of the display, also have a part to play.

You can read more about our in-depth testing methodology just below, otherwise you can scroll right to the results and see which 20 smartphones offer the best battery life right now. As tends to be the case, the list is predominantly Android devices, but never fear Apple fans – we’ve got another chart a little further down that displays the best iPhone battery life, too.

Best phone battery life: How we test

To find out how well your phone performs against its rivals, we’ve combined all the battery scores from the countless smartphone tests we conduct every year into one easy-to-use graph, so you can see which phones are the best battery performers.

To measure a smartphone’s battery life, we run a continuous video-playback test. The video file includes a handful of scenes from Spider-Man 2, encoded to H.264 and looped to a 20-hour length. We use the VLC video player app on either Google Play or the Apple App Store to play the file and record the length of time played on reboot. We also set the phone to aeroplane mode, turn off any automatic brightness and sleep settings and set the screen brightness to a standardised 170cd/m2.

Aeroplane mode switches off all of the phone’s wireless features – naturally, extending battery life – which means that our tests are repeatable and consistent. The big problem with wireless is that signal strength can come and go, which forces the phone to adjust the amount of power that it uses constantly, causing variable results.

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Best phone battery life: Results

After only managing to land a handful of handsets on this list in years gone by, Samsung has really stepped up its game recently, delivering a grand total of six smartphones into our top 20 hierarchy. The graph has annoyingly cut off the suffix but that’s the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra at the very top, with an outstanding and unprecedented result of 34hrs 36mins.

The rest of the S24 series makes it on the list as well, with the Galaxy S24 Plus and Galaxy S24 in 12th and 15th place, respectively. Last year’s S23 Plus and S23 Ultra (also sans suffix) manage to hang around, as does the more affordable mid-range Galaxy A54 5G down near the very bottom.

Samsung’s dominance may be noteworthy but there’s another name that’s prevalent here: Honor. The Chinese brand is nipping at Samsung’s heels with five handsets of its own in our top 20. The Honor Magic 5 Lite is an impressive pick from last year but the Honor Magic 6 Pro, Magic 6 Lite, Honor 200 and Honor 200 Pro are 2024 devices, so Honor has really come into play this year.

Rounding out the top five, we’ve got the Nothing Phone (2) and the OnePlus 12, at over 30 hours apiece. Both brands also have another handset each in the list, with the OnePlus 11 a little further down, followed closely by the Nothing Phone (2a). Sony is the only other brand with multiple entries here, with both the Xperia 10 IV and Xperia 10 V sitting comfortably in the top ten.

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Best phone battery life: iPhone results

The best iPhones may have just missed the cut in the above graph but there’s still decent stamina to be had on the Apple side of the fence. We’ve laid this out a little differently, presenting the iPhones in release order, from the iPhone SE (2020) all the way up to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Our testing data actually goes even further back, to the iPhone 5C, but for the sake of keeping the graph manageable, I’m focusing on models from this decade.

As you can see, stamina has generally improved overall, though some, like the 15 Pro Max, scored near enough identically to their predecessors, while others like the iPhone 15 actually lost a few hours compared to the iPhone 14. We see the biggest improvement with the iPhone 15 Pro, which shows a dramatic jump from the iPhone 14 Pro, nearly drawing level with the 15 Pro Max.