Razer Phone apparently gets awful battery life for its capacity

[D13H4RD]

Well, color me disappointed.

 

The Razer Phone (AKA Nextbit Robin 2) had some potential to impress, especially its 120Hz display.

 

And while the display is impressive in terms of how it makes the Android experience so fluid, it could beat the Google Pixel 2, that seems to have come at a cost of battery. GSMArena ran some tests and concluded that while the battery life isn't terrible per se, it is pretty disappointing given the capacity.

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After that pretty gloomy screen chapter, the Razer Phone finds itself in desperate need of some restitution. Its massive 4,000mAh battery shows plenty of potential on paper. Considering all the supposed energy-saving factors we discussed in the displayed chapter, we were really hoping for a spectacular battery endurance rating. Unfortunately, this is not quite what the numbers show.

It appears that even with the lowered max brightness, the high refresh rate panel is really power hungry, to the point where it dragged both of our on-screen tests down pretty badly. Seven hours of web browsing is far from acceptable in a 2017 flagship. Especially one with such a massive battery. The thing is, every time you scroll a page, the phone has to work extra hard to push 120 fps to saturate the panel's refresh rate.

 

However, there seems to be more to it than that, since the H264 MP4 video we use for our playback tests is encoded at 30 frames per second. Hence, if you just let it play without constantly messing with controls, the panel maintains its variable refresh rate equally low (30Hz).

Still, that didn't help the Razer Phone surpass the seven and a half hour mark, so our only logical conclusion is that the fancy new 120Hz, IGZO panel is power hungry, no matter how hard it is pushed. So, there go our hopes of any power efficiency benefits.

However, for the sake of thoroughness and after reading the multiple requests you left in our comments, we redid our tests with the refresh rate setting fixed to 60Hz. The similar numbers only solidified our conclusion.

 

And this is not a case of bad implementation on the Snapdragon 835 chip either. Its 3G call time endurance is solid and so is its standby time of a little over 270 hours. So, the display is definitely the culprit here - battery life is really disappointing with screen-on tasks.

Charging the Razer Phone, however, is impressively fast thanks to the Quick Charge 4+ technology. We managed to get our review unit from 0% all the way up to 70% in just half an hour. And this is a 4,000mAh battery we are talking about.

That being said, wireless charging is a notable omission from the Razer Phone high-end specs list.

Source: https://www.gsmarena.com/razer_phone-review-1683p3.php

 

 

Don't get me wrong. I love me a 120Hz display as it has the potential to significantly change the UX as my experience with one of the new iPad Pros dictated.

 

But clearly, this is first-generation tech, and the gigantic cost to battery life and other factors (low maximum brightness of 223 nits) are tough to ignore if this is going to be a daily driver.

[McHox]

7 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

And this is a 4,00mAh battery we are talking about.

typo in the last bit

[D13H4RD]

Just now, McHox said:

typo in the last bit

Fixed.

[General Winter]

i think like all gaming oriented devices with this being no exception, are very power hungry

 

120hz, 8 gb of ram, and i don't know the gpu and cpu off the top of my head but its all top of the line stuff which eat battery life like crazy im not too surprised this is the case

[D13H4RD]

Just now, General Winter said:

i think like all gaming oriented devices with this being no exception, are very power hungry

 

120hz, 8 gb of ram, and i don't know the gpu and cpu off the top of my head but its all top of the line stuff which eat battery life like crazy im not too surprised this is the case

The processor is a Snapdragon 835. It has 8 Kryo 260 CPU cores which operate as a 4x4 cluster for low-power and high-power tasks. The GPU is an Adreno 540.

 

The reason this phone gets awful battery life is the screen. The Samsung Galaxy Note8 for instance gets better on-screen battery life despite having a smaller battery.

[General Winter]

1 minute ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

The processor is a Snapdragon 835. It has 8 Kryo 260 CPU cores which operate as a 4x4 cluster for low-power and high-power tasks. The GPU is an Adreno 540.

 

The reason this phone gets awful battery life is the screen. The Samsung Galaxy Note8 for instance gets better on-screen battery life despite having a smaller battery.

i really don't see the point of 120hz on a cell phone, which they even say most games can't reach anyway

 

on the flip side even lowering the hz and res did little to help its battery life last any longer (according to the article)

[D13H4RD]

Just now, General Winter said:

i really don't see the point of 120hz on a cell phone, which they even say most games can't reach anyway

 

on the flip side even lowering the hz and res did little to help its battery life last any longer (according to the article)

The refresh rate actually makes quite a difference in UX performance. Simply put, less stuttering and more fluid animations. 120Hz might become a new standard sometime in the future.

 

The problem is that the IGZO panel is enormously power hungry on the Razer Phone. The cons drastically outweigh the pros in this case. You get to experience fluidity like no-other but at the cost of poor battery life for the battery size and poor visibility outdoors (not even sunlight).

[Enderman]

What? I don't see how that is bad at all...

Almost all other flagship phones get about 6-8 hours of screen on time during normal use...

[D13H4RD]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

What? I don't see how that is bad at all...

Almost all other flagship phones get about 6-8 hours of screen on time during normal use...

GSMArena’s battery tests are different. The video and web tests aren’t indicative of what you’ll get IRL. Oftentimes, what you’ll get is significantly lower.

 

The Note8, for instance, got 10+ hours on both tests, but my SOT is usually 5-6.

 

The Razer Phone’s IRL battery result will be worse.

[General Winter]

30 minutes ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

The refresh rate actually makes quite a difference in UX performance. Simply put, less stuttering and more fluid animations. 120Hz might become a new standard sometime in the future.

 

The problem is that the IGZO panel is enormously power hungry on the Razer Phone. The cons drastically outweigh the pros in this case. You get to experience fluidity like no-other but at the cost of poor battery life for the battery size and poor visibility outdoors (not even sunlight).

i mean 60hz is more than fluid for me and especially on a small screen i don't plan to do much with outside basic social media, internet stuff and my never satisfied pool of music i can hardly think of a reason 120hz would be needed on such a tiny screen; i can understand a gaming rig, smooth is better and gives overally better reaction for said games; but on a tiny screen which has next to no media which even hits 120hz i couldn't justify having such a thing, 60hz would've been more than enough i barely notice these on my phone

 

really im the kinda guy who prefers graphics over refresh rate so this was never going to appeal to me anyway but 120hz really is overkill on a smartphone, and a waste since what the hell are you going to do with that? its effectively going to be a battery hunger gimmick since there is virtually no media for android that can even use that and i really can't see the point, 120hz isn't all that most people say it is from my experience, its nice but its not worth getting a new monitor (or in this case a new phone)