The "Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders" vs ROG5 Preview: Branded vs Original

Battery Life - A Horrible Downgrade

Battery life for the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is interesting for one fact alone: Qualcomm and ASUS’ decision to equip the device with a much smaller 4000mAh battery. While that figure alone isn’t particularly small for a regular device, the industry has seen steadily growing battery capacities over the years. 4000mAh is actually the same size battery that ASUS is employing in the small form-factor Zenfone 8, and the ROG Phone 5 has a massive 6000mAh unit, so naturally we’re expecting quite a massive difference in the battery performance.

As expected, the 60Hz web browsing scores of the SSI are just horrible and massively disappointing. At 10.38 hours runtime, this is only 62% of the battery life presented by the ROG Phone 5 under the same test conditions. The SSI’s battery is 66% of the sibling device’s size, and the further difference could be explained by the more aggressive performance characteristics of the SSI.

At 120Hz, which I opted for instead of the 144Hz maximum of the phone just for apples-to-apples purposes, the device ended up as the shortest lasting high refresh phone we’ve recently tested. At only 60.9% of the ROG Phone 5’s battery life, we’re seeing two polar opposites in terms of the runtime in our chart.

In PCMark, it’s again the same story. Besides the Exynos 2100 regular small S21, the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders ends up as the worst performing device in recent testing.

Overall, the SSI is just a perplexing phone. For the little weight difference and 0.4mm thickness differences, we’re getting a phone that’s really only less than two-thirds of the ROG Phone 5 when it comes to the battery life. This puts it amongst one of the worst performing Snapdragon 888 devices on the market when it comes to battery life, which is abysmal.