Android Phones And Tablets Ranked By Battery Life: Longest Lasting Smartphones Aren’t Top-Tier Devices

Android smartphones can have a pretty bad reputation when it comes to battery life, though that reputation has definitely improved in general over time. A new report updated today from the Root Uninstaller Team (who created Battery Stats Plus for Google’s mobile OS) ranks the top 15 and worst 15 Android devices based on statistics shared through their app. There’s a huge variance between the best and the worst, and the ones on top might not be the flagship devices you’re looking for.

As you can see in the list, Root Uninstaller looks at both Android tablets and Android smartphones, which you might expect to skew the results a little bit. But despite a dominating performance from the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the list of the top 15 performers was a healthy mix of phones and slates. Coming in a close second with over 60 hours of battery life on average was the LG Optimus Pro, a phone released in July with a hardware keyboard and relatively small 240×320 display running Android 2.3.3 with a 3 MP camera. It’s on odd duck, with its QWERTY and VGA video, but it’s cheap, and according to this list, if it’s battery life you’re after most of all, you can do no better than the Optimus Pro.

The Motorola DROID RAZR HD also ranks pretty highly, highest among more up-market devices, with north of 40 hours battery life on average, and the HTC One V doesn’t rank that far behind with 40 hours. The RAZR HD’s battery life is something I can actually personally attest to: it’s a smartphone that keeps going long after I expect it to have faded. Admittedly, I’m not generally using it that much since it isn’t my main device, but there’s no denying it outlasts most of its competition by a wide margin.


top15ddWay down at the other end of the spectrum, you’ll find the Samsung Galaxy Mini (two versions) with just over four hours each, and the Sony Xperia X8 and LG Optimus G. Samsung appears a lot on the list of the bottom 15, but then it also appears a lot on the top list, too. In fact, one thing this list serves to point out is just how much Samsung now dominates the Android device ecosystem.

Overall, Root Uninstaller’s list covers 474 Android devices and spans 5,585 user-submitted battery reports, so it has a decent-sized sampling, plus you see a lot of synchronicity with what reviewers and users have shared anecdotally about device battery life. The average life overall for Android devices is 20.4 hours, by the way, or just under a full day, and the top battery killer apps are generally actually boring system processes, as well as something called “Cowboy.” Battery life isn’t bad overall based on these numbers, but it’s not great either: next generation battery tech, whatever that ends up being, can’t arrive soon enough.