The iPhone 6 Review
by Joshua Ho, Brandon Chester, Chris Heinonen & Ryan Smith on September 30, 2014 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 6
Battery Life
Battery life is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of any smartphone. However, battery life is an enormous subject, and while it may seem simple on the surface there’s a great deal of underlying complexity. In order to try and cover the full breadth of use cases, we start with our baseline test, which is now the web browsing battery life test. In order to try and control for extraneous variables and get a good relative comparison, we standardize all displays to 200 nits on a full white display.
Our first test is in WiFi web browsing. As we can see, the iPhone 6 puts up a surprising showing for a phone with such a small battery. If anything, it seems that Apple leaned towards the conservative side in their advertised numbers as we managed to get higher than expected battery life. It may seem strange that the iPhone 6 achieves such a strong showing despite the small battery, but this is because the test is designed to avoid penalizing a phone for having a faster SoC or data connection.
In LTE web browsing, we see the same story. The iPhone 6 is about equal to or better than the competition, which is in line with what we would expect given the cellular architecture. In the case of the iPhone 6 and most other flagship smartphones this year, components such as Qualcomm’s QFE1100 envelope tracker, WTR1625 transceiver, and MDM9x25 modem have managed to make LTE power consumption approximately equal to WiFi power consumption. With the deployment of category 6 LTE and next generation RF components we could see LTE battery life exceed WiFi battery life.
While the web browsing test gives us a good picture of battery life in display-bound tasks, intensive use tends to be more SoC-bound. In order to see how phones compare in SoC-bound workloads, we turn to GFXBench, which has an infinite looping test. This test also provides a good idea of nominal performance. Unfortunately, for now we cannot report an accurate Basemark OS II battery life score as the test will stop when low battery notifications pop up on the screen. We are currently investigating methods to bypass this issue and report a final score in the near future.
In the GFXBench test, at first it seems that the iPhone 6 is one of the worst for battery life under sustained load. However, once we look at the performance degradation over time it makes a lot more sense. This seems to be the type of workload that Apple referenced in their presentations, because this is the first phone I’ve seen that successfully does a full rundown without actually throttling. Of course, this does come with high skin temperatures. The phone definitely gets hot, but not uncomfortable. Using a FLIR camera, I saw peak temperatures of around 43 degrees Celcius, so it definitely doesn't exceed 50C in most conditions.
Normally, I would expect a 4.7” class smartphone to need a battery around the size of the HTC One (M7) or Motorola Moto X (2013) to keep pace with phones like the One (M8) and Galaxy S5, but Apple has pulled it off with a battery that is much smaller. There are two key factors that we can point to in this case. The first is the display, which can avoid pushing the LED backlight towards the higher current region that is much less efficient. This is because the amount of light-blocking circuitry is reduced and the active area of the display can be higher. The second aspect is the SoC, which is on a lower power 20nm process node. While TSMC’s 20nm process doesn’t have FinFET, improved silicon straining and high K metal gate make it possible to drive down active power and leakage when compared to 28nm processes. It’s also likely that the A8’s architecture is more efficient than other SoCs we’ve seen this year. However, it's important to note that without a capacitance and voltage table or something similarly concrete we can't really prove this statement.
Charge Time
While battery life determines the time spent away from a charger, the time spent attached to a charger is just as important. Even if most people charge their phones at night, there are plenty of cases where people don't have at least five hours to spend charging their phone. For example, forgetting to plug the phone into a charger before going to sleep or charging a phone between connecting flights are all times when charge time becomes crucial. In order to properly test for charge time, charge time is measured as the time from when the phone is connected to the charger to the time when the A/C adapter reaches its lowest power state with the phone still connected.
As you can see, the iPhone 6 performs reasonably well, and ends up in the same range as the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 6 Plus ends up on the high side because it ships with the same power adapter as the iPhone 6, which can provide a maximum of one amp at five volts.
Fortunately, based on the USB device information for the phones, both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus support charging with power adapters like the iPad charging block that can provide up to 2.1 amps at five volts. Using one of these chargers will dramatically reduce charge time on the new iPhones, and it's a very worthwhile investment (assuming you don't already have an iPad) for the iPhone 6 Plus in particular.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
531 Comments
View All Comments
Torakaru - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Which Galaxy did you used? Because I have been reading around that 1GB is not enough and many users complaint about it (doesnt matter if iPhone5/5s/6/6+ or last year iPad's) as for instance the Safary crashes/fully reloads even after more than a couple of tabs in use.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
"Could you be so kind to be more precise about that feeling that you have? It is due lack of RAM for multitasking, or also for single tasks?"It's a lack of RAM for multitasking. At some point the OS will reach its limit and be forced to evict apps and/or cached Safari tabs. The 5S and 6 have a it a bit worse than the 5 due to the fact that the AArch64 processors in the 5S and 6 require additional RAM to be allocated to the OS to operate the 32bit and 64bit user lands simultaniously.
refineryorker - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
The other interesting thing I noticed about this review and many of the top performing non I phones is that for American consumers, a lot of these phones don't really exist to purchase on the major U.S. carriers.I visited the t mobile, sprint, Att, and Verizon websites and
The Hauwei honor 6, the Samsung Galaxy s5 broadband lte a, Nokia lumia 930, Nokia lumia 630, and the Xperia z1s don't exist on those websites.
The Samsung Galaxy s5 T-Mobile only exists for T-Mobile.
The HTC one e8 is only on sprint.
So all this means is that the List of phones that Americans can purchase looks vastly different than the top performing non iPhones on the above list.
Most non iPhones that Americans can purchase aren't top performers.
roncron - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I've read at least 15 reviews of the iPhone 6, including the excellent review at iLounge.com. But this review is the best of them all. Very thorough and scientific. The review, while long, is also well-written and nicely organized.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Thank you.cknobman - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I take your battery test results with a grain of salt when it comes to actual real world use. I know they are scientific but it just seems they paint the iPhones as having great battery life when in reality it blows.We have two iPhone 5s in our house, an LG G2, a Nokia Lumia 1520, and a SG4.
In practical use the iPhone's cant even get through 3/4 of a day without being drained dry.
The SG4 can barely make it to evening.
The LG G2 can make an entire day easy but needs to be recharged every day.
The Nokia can go 2 days without being charged.
Before getting the iPhone 5s's I read reviews thinking that those things should get better battery life than the SG4, most of that opinion coming from reviews like yours. Little did I know that those thoughts were bogus.
I dont expect much more practical battery life from and iPhone 6 either. This is not isolated to my house either.
munim - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
It doesn't seem like you're trolling so think about the following factors:I'm assuming different people are using each phone. They probably have different usage habits, different apps syncing, different amount of apps syncing, maybe one person uses the phone more outdoors using higher brightness / GPS / LTE as opposed to wifi.
zhenya00 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Without some context your comparisons are useless. I presume the phones are owned by different family members and see different usage patterns. Perhaps some of them are backup or work/non-primary phones. Perhaps the iPhones used more heavily than the others as is often the case (I have family members who own iPhones and have work provided Blackberries - I bet they'd say the iPhone has poor battery life as all but which one are they using all day and which one sits on the counter?)You could have bad backups you've restored to them that cause drains, or other problem software. My 5s tended to see about 2.5 hours of 'use' per day, and I'd tend to get about 5 usage hours and 2 days between charges. The 6 seems to be giving me closer to 7-8 hours of use, and again, 2 days of standby.
cknobman - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I cannot give you exact usage patterns for all of the phones.BUT
The iPhone 5s's and the LG G2 are used by my 3 teenagers (two 16, one 14). They all do plenty of facebooking, instagraming, messaging, and tweeting. While non of them have the exact same usage pattern I can safely say that they are all similar. I find it ironic that the two iPhones just happen to be unable to get through a 8 hour period without losing charge. I had to buy both of those phones battery cases for my kids. The LG G2 on the other hand has never had a battery problem.
As for the SG4, that is used by my wife who is a facebook, instagram, and pintrest junky. She can drain a battery on anything in a day. Usually her phone makes it from morning until night but sometimes she kills it before bedtime.
The Nokia is mine and it gets a decent amount of use. During the day not a lot of things going on it while I am at work outside of games when Im in the restroom and during lunch. Once at home it is my primary source of access to anything digital I need. I dont touch a computer once I leave the office.
beggerking@yahoo.com - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I have the same conclusion with mine. Nokia seem to last forever on tiny batteries.