How Much Does it Cost to Power an iPhone 5 or Galaxy S III for a Year?
Hundreds of dollars? Tens of dollars? But one dollar? How much do users pay to keep their phones charged each year?
Comparisons have been made between Apple's iPhone 5 and its rivals — notably, Samsung's flagship Galaxy S III smartphone — across nearly every measurable point. So why not talk about battery life, too?
But not the number of hours that each phone can last before it needs to be charged. Rather, how much it actually costs to keep each phone fully charged for an entire year. You know, power bills and all that – how much is a typical user spending when using each device over a long period of time?
If you guessed an answer in dollars, you've overshot the mark like a poor Price is Right contestant. And while there might be a significant difference between the two devices numerically, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it's going to take a significant chunk out of your wallet.
Opower crunched the numbers by measuring just how much juice it took to charge Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy S III in watt-hours, and then multiplied these figures by 365 – assuming the worst-case scenario that a user is charging his or her smartphone from dead to full each day. Multiplying this rate (in kilowatt hours) by the average U.S. cost for kilowatt hours ($0.118 per) generated the approximate annual charge to continually power each device.
And the results? Apple's iPhone 5 wins out, with an annual charging cost of (a mighty) 41 cents versus the 53 cents it would cost to continually charge Samsung's Galaxy S III – again, a big difference in numbers, but hardly a noticeable dent in one's bank account.
The major reason for the difference, as one might expect, comes from the fact that the Galaxy S III sports a larger battery than the iPhone 5 – 2,100 mAh versus 1,440 mAh, as detailed in the latest head-to-head battery showdown from Android Authority.
"The paramount point here though is not the difference between the two phones, but rather their striking similarity: the energy consumption of a modern smartphone is minuscule," writes Opower's Barry Fischer.
For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).