- The EU has published a database of smartphone -battery life
- It suggests that Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra offers excellent battery ton.
- There are plenty of other interesting revelations in the data
If you are looking for the phone with the best battery life that is over its lifetime, the European Union (EU) has just made your job a little easier. That’s because it has published a database of battery rating (via Android Authority) for a large number of the best smartphones and there are some fascinating revelations buried within.
Searching through the EU’s new European product register by energy labeling database is not very straightforward – you need a phone’s model identifier number rather than just entering something like “Google Pixel 9A” – but once you’ve got it, you can get info on battery life, introduce protection, drop resistance and more.
It makes it a useful way to put phones against each other and see what has an advantage. For example, in the eternal match between Samsung and Apple, we have compared the battery classifications of the flagship iPhone 16 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Here’s something interesting: S25 Ultra is rated at twice as many battery charging cycles as iPhone.
Specifically, the EU is expecting the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is estimated at 2,000 charging cycles, while the iPhone 16 Pro Max sits on 1,000 cycles. It seems to give Samsung a significant victory in the battery department on paper.
However, it is not as clear as that. The S25 Ultra’s “Battery Endurance Per Cycle” rating sits at a hair under 45 hours, which the EU says means “how long a smartphone’s battery lasts from a full charge to when to recharge again.”
For the iPhone 16 Pro Max, its battery endurance is per year. Cycle higher in 48 hours. So iPhone may last a little longer per. Charging, but the S25 Ultra has been rated for several charging cycles.
Comparison of the best smartphones
What about the charging cycles on other popular phones? We have found database items for the best devices on our list of the best smartphones and entered them in the diagram above for easy comparison.
Looking at the data, it is clear that OnePlus 13 offers by far the longest charge per day. Cycle of 61 hours and 36 minutes. The iPhone 16 Pro is meanwhile the bottom of the package in 37 hours. But both phones are classified for 1,000 charging cycles.
The total number of charging cycles is not an estimate of how many phone’s battery can take before it dies, but rather the number of complete charges until you start to see degradation in its performance. So the above numbers are not necessarily an estimate of a phone’s total life cycle.
How do we know how reliable all this is? The information is almost certainly self-reported, as-you would believe-can lead to dodgy scenarios and an incentive to fudge the numbers. However, there may be some reliability as the EU has provided regulations on how battery endurance should be measured. By giving them observed, we can put a little confidence in the numbers, although we cannot be 100% safe.
In addition to having to take these numbers with a healthy degree of skepticism, there is also much more to decide which phone to buy than just look at the battery capacities. You need to consider its chip, cameras, software, durability and more. However, if you hand out the life of the battery over the life of a phone above all else, the EU’s database can actually be a useful resource.
