BlackBerry Torch 9800 Review: Keeping RIM's Flame Alive

Battery Life

BlackBerry has long held a pretty established reputation for battery life. I was obviously excited to put the Torch through the usual suite of battery life tests we run on all smartphones and see how it stood up to the competition.

For browsing battery life, we load a suite of pages on a continual loop on a special page that emulates normal browsing on the browser and prevent the display from going to sleep. Brightness is set to 50% on the device. For cellular data, WiFi and GPS are disabled. For WiFi, the cellular radio is left on and GPS is off. 

For calls, we establish a call, play music on both ends, and wait for the device to shut itself off. The results weren't what I was expecting:

The Torch does a surprisingly good job on WiFi, coming close to besting the iPhone 4. That's pretty much where it stops being spectacular. Call times aren't quite as good as I had hoped, though they're admittedly above the 5.8 hours of advertised UMTS (3G) call time, so we do in fact exceed what RIM advertises. They don't publish a 3G web browsing battery life estimate, but again the Torch is middling, right with the iPhone 3GS. 

I'm a bit surprised the Torch didn't fare better considering its slower than average CPU. That said, if the Marvell SoC is still 65nm, we're going to really see 45nm parts pull ahead of BlackBerry that simply do more for less power.