Test results: Battery life
We have two ways of measuring the battery life of mobile phones. We set the screen brightness to 100 cd/m², which is medium brightness suitable for indoor use. With the Sunspider test we put a maximum load on the CPU in order to see what the worst case scenario performance is of the battery. The second test is lighter, here we play back an MP4 video file. The most recent ARM processors with the NEON instruction set are able to apply hardware-based acceleration, and the Tegra 3 can even use its energy-efficient companion core for this task.
The results show that the Snapdragon S4 in the HTC One S and the Tegra 3 chip use up a lot of power when the chips are under full loads. In the Sunspider test the HTC One S made it almost 2.5 hours, while the Samsung Galaxy S3 lasted about two hours.
The results of the lighter test with the MP4 video file differ less widely. The Galaxy S3 is ahead, and the other phones also perform very well.
