I tested the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to see how long it lasts on a charge. However, I wanted to see how well it stacks up against the iPhone 15 Pro Max in terms of power efficiency.
There's one tiny problem, though.
PCMark, the industry standard for battery life testing, only has a benchmark for Android phones — not iOS devices. As such, Mashable created its own custom test that can run on both the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra battery life
According to my testing, the Galaxy S24 Ultra lasts 13 hours and 1 minute on a single charge.
Did the iPhone 15 Pro Max beat it? Yes. It lasted 14 hours and 53 minutes; that's nearly 15 hours.
In other words, the iPhone 15 Pro Max the Galaxy S24 Ultra lasts nearly 2 hours longer than the iPhone 15 Pro Max (1 hour and 52 minutes to be exact).
Battery life quick look
Galaxy S24 Ultra: 13 hours and 1 minute
iPhone 15 Pro Max: 14 hours and 53 minutes
How we tested the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
As mentioned at the outset, PCMark's phone battery life test doesn't support iOS devices, making its benchmark unsuitable for testing. Consequently, we ran a TikTok rundown test on both phones.
On Sunday, 3:50 p.m., at 100% battery charge on both devices at max brightness, I fired up the same TikTok video, which ran loops until the devices ran out of juice.
We ran Audacity in the background, allowing us to look back at the recording to see exactly when the sounds stopped playing, indicating that the phone has shutdown.
According to our testing, the Galaxy S24 Ultra tapped out at 5:50 a.m. the next day. The iPhone 15 Pro Max, on the other hand, lasted until 6:43 a.m.
There are some limitations to this test, however, in that the Galaxy S24 Ultra has a higher peak brightness than the iPhone 15 Pro Max (2,600 nits vs. 2,000 nits), which may have contributed to its shorter runtime.
