The general consensus is that the Galaxy Tab has good battery life. Most users are reporting well over 24 hours in normal use and for me it’s the first ‘smartphone’ I’ve had that actually gets through 18-hours of an extended day, fully connected, syncronising and ‘present’ on instant messaging networks without a top-up charge. At last I can feast on all the goodness of the mobile internet!
I mentioned in a video review of the Samsung N350 that it’s getting harder to talk about battery life because the range of min-max is getting wider and wider. At the low-end, devices are staying connected on fractions of a Watt lasting multiple days and at the top-end of the mobile spectrum, dual-core netbooks with discreet graphics could suck an Galaxy Tab battery dry in under an hour.
If I could stand leaving the display off for long enough, I’d do a Wifi-only standby test on the Galaxy Tab; But I can’t because it would take days! The best I can do is a few hours of streaming radio which I did today while I was looking after my baby.
With UMTS connected (voice, SMS, MMS, no data) and Wifi connected to my local hotspot, syncronisation enabled for Gmail, Contacts and Facebook, polling for the IMAP client, GTalk active and a 10 minute update on Twicca, I fired up TuneIn radio, connected to BBC Radio 1 in the UK and started to listen.
Now Samsung are usually pretty damn good when it comes to electronic engineering. Their UMPCS were always class-leading, their netbooks too. It looks like they did it again with their tablet because in 3.5hrs of streaming, the Galaxy Tab used just 13% battery. That’s 13% of the 15Wh battery or 1.95wh. Divide that by 3.5 and you get 0.55W.
I’m amazed!
I remember early ultra mobile PC and Netbooks whose Wifi alone would take 2W!
The Galaxy Tab will stream audio over Wifi, plus a bunch of phone and background tasks, for nearly 30 hours. In comparison to the best currently – available Intel platform, that’s 5x less power.
Disclaimer: Battery drain may not be linear but I’ve seen nothing in my usage that would indicate a drastically non-linear drain curve.
Anyone else got battery life tests from other scenarios?
personally, i see no reason for battery life to go longer than 16hrs (then sleep for 8hrs) & would prefer to get thinner, lighter devices.
there is too much of a good thing, even battery life, when it adds excessive size & weight.
Thats good until you go away to a conference and forget to charge the device overnight ;-)
But in general, 16-20hrs is good. Can’t wait to get the HDMI docking station. It’s going next to my bed!
dont blame them .-) it is the firs time that a device reaches that. today phones tell us to be charged ever couple of hours – my n900 – but do you remember the long gone days when you charged you whatever phone once a week?
20hrs bring me to the situation not to take a whole bunch of chargers or adapters with me on business trips round europe (think for uk an it)
stefan
thing is my older winmo 6.1 htc has a working caaity of 8-10 hrs, but a standby max of 450. so the question remains: hat is really important: always on or instant on if needed? or only the phone function always on and everything else in sleep mode?
Always on is important for programs that need to be polled. Mostly IM skype, location apps. I vote for low power always on!
My samsung phone goes dead before the battery indicator reaches down to 50%. It has always behaved that way, tricking me at first in believing it had a fantastic battery life.
The better approach to measure battery life is to use the device till the battery can no longer keep the device turned on. And all indications are that the Tab can indeed last a FULL day of unrestricted usage (i.e. all radios on, apps working in the background…) which, combined with its great portability, makes it a truly useful on-the-go tool.
I was about to buy a Galaxy S as my main device, but now I’m wondering whether I’d be better off with a Tab…
I just got 36 hours from the last charge to the first Recharge notice. I used it for a lot of email. 3 qik video calls (total of 35 minutes), video playback from youtube and other video sites (flash), video recording (few minutes). Tried lots of games, filesharing with frostwire on the local wifi network, tweetdeck and played a lot of music in it.
In general, that’s what I’m getting. 1.5 days. Awesome!
are you sure it lasts about 18 hours of unrestricted usage because it only seems like it can go on for 14 hours at the most.