Phone Smart

Apple’s biggest iPhone yet carries the biggest expectations for good performance and also the biggest battery among its peers (not counting iPads) so it should be able to outlast the smaller iPhone 6 easily. And it does – the numbers are inside.

The new iPhone 6 Plus can last almost 24 hours of 3G calling which is a little better than the new Sony Xperia Z3 and better than the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 by almost 6 hours. We’ll watch eagerly as the Galaxy Note 4 battery test get underway to see how the Apple phablet’s biggest rival fares in this regard.

The iPhone 6 will give you some 11 hours less – that’s a big difference indeed.

If you’re going for a big-screened smartphone with a high resolution a solid web browsing experience should be high on your list of priorities.

The Apple iPhone 6 Plus kept on browsing for little over 9 hours. While an impressive score on its own it doesn’t get the iPhone 6 Plus a mention near the top in our list. To put things in perspective the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 achieved the same result (1 minute less). The Apple iPhone 6 gathered and hour and a half more in this test, though.

We’ve already concluded that the 401ppi screen of the Apple iPhone 6 Plus is really good. It’s great for watching video and thankfully it will grant you over 11 hours of screen on time for your favorite clips. The Galaxy Note 3 gets 2 hours more while the smaller iPhone 6 lasts the lesser 9:24 h.

When we add up the numbers we get a 79 hour endurance rating. That’s the number of hours you can last on a single charge if you do an hour of calling, browsing and watching video per day before you’d need an outlet. That result places the Apple iPhone 6 Plus in the top 20 of the phones we’ve tested. It also means the iPhone 6 Plus is in the top 10 of the phablets we’ve tested.

Most importantly it means the iPhone 6 Plus has the longest-lasting battery of any iPhone to date and the first properly good battery among Apple’s smartphones. At the end of the day the most important thing aren’t the bezels, pixels or clock speed – it’s the percentage count of your phone’s battery – and the iPhone 6 Plus is unlikely to disappoint there.

If you want to see all the other phones we’ve tested head on over to our battery test page.