Phones with best battery life 2023 - buyer’s guide

The Realme GT Neo 3T is one of the best bang-for-the-buck offers right now and while usually the top spot is reserved for a Poco, the Neo 3T won this one for its better power autonomy. It is also a powerful smartphones and among the most dependable performers when it comes to battery life.

The Realme GT Neo 3T has a lot of flagship-grade features - a great HDR10+ OLED screen, 120Hz at that, one of the most powerful Snapdragon chips - SD870 5G, and plenty of cameras.

The Neo 3T has a large 5,000mAh battery that turned out to be quite dependable – it provides the ultimate gaming and/or multimedia experience in one charge. And then you can top up that battery quite fast with the supplied 80W charger.

There are phones that scored better, that’s for sure, but none of these can match the Neo 3T for its all-round package and battery life, especially considering the Snapdragon 870 powerful chipset.

Next on our list is the Sony Xperia 10 IV. It’s a mid-ranger with outstanding battery autonomy and an excellent screen for multimedia. Plus, it is one of the few phones in this price range to offer a dedicated zoom camera.

The Xperia 10 IV wowed us with its battery life – it aced all tests, including standby. It also impressed us with a great HDR OLED screen with 1B colors and dependable triple-camera on the back. The traditional Sony design with IP68-rated ingress protection is always appreciated, too.

The Xperia 10 IV is not an ideal smartphone, though. For its great battery life and versatile camera, you won’t be getting high refresh rate for the display and stereo speakers. The underpowered Snapdragon 695 5G won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Still, the Xperia 10 IV offers smooth Android experience, great multimedia and imaging, too, and with the excellent battery life it earned a spot on our shortlist.

The Realme 10 Pro+ is one of the few mid-rangers that has quite a few upgrades over the previous model. The 10 Pro+ brought us a larger OLED screen with a higher 120Hz refresh rate, more colors (10-bit depth), improved brightness and HDR10+ certification.

We also appreciated the improved chipset, even if the differences between the Dimensity 1080 and 920 are small. But the newer chip and the newer Android 13+Realme UI 4 software suite are probably responsible for the outstanding battery life the 10 Pro+ achieved on our battery life test. Oh, and we cannot but appreciate the slightly faster charging.

The new Realme 10 Pro+ turned out good enough for multimedia and gaming thanks to its great screen and adequate performance. But we also found it to be a good cameraphone, as it consistently delivered great photos and videos with its primary and ultrawide cameras. On the other hand, don't expect good selfies with this one.

Overall, we do recommend exploring the Realme 10 Pro+ if it ticks the right boxes for you. It's a great phone for its money and delivers solid performance across the board.

The Realme 9 is one of the most recent smartphone to impress us with battery life. It is an incredibly strong performer when it comes to battery autonomy and for that we can easily recommend it.

The Realme 9 offers a likable 90Hz OLED screen, can charge fast, and it offers dependable main camera.

It’s a phone with a weak chipset, though, there is no ingress protection, no stereo speakers, no 5G either. It is an obvious downgrade from the Realme 8, too. But as far as battery life is concerned, it can last long and it’s not a bad phone to own, too.

The Realme 8 impressed us with its long battery life and fast charging. It also packs one very decent Super AMOLED screen and a capable Helio G95 chip, which does well for games. It also offers speedy charging, NFC, a 3.5mm jack, a dedicated microSD slot, and even FM radio.

Its camera setup may be packing four shooters, but the photo quality of the main and ultrawide shooters was rather uninspiring. The videos turned out nice, though, selfies, too.

The Realme 8 isn't the best phone, but it's cheap, it aced our battery life test, and it offers more than enough for its price.

The Realme 8i is the last Realme recommendation for now, we promise. It’s one of the most affordable smartphones in this chapter, but it still can offer a 102Hz LCD screen, good camera performance, and outstanding battery life.

The Realme 8i is quite cheap and for that we can forgive the absence of stereo speakers, splash resistance or the ultrawide camera. It’s not that fast either, but we found the performance to be satisfactory and we rarely saw stutter.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 is one attractive budget offer. It has a 6.43" 90Hz OLED screen and relies on the decent even if behind the curve Snapdragon 680 chipset. The camera on the back offers good regular photos, too. The stereo speakers are loud enough.

But the reason we included this Redmi Note 11 is because of its excellent battery life and 33W fast charging. You can watch videos for 20 hours and then some or talk for 37 hours uninterrupted. The Redmi Note 11offers great battery autonomy in addition to its balanced feature set and we do recommend it. Plus, it is very reasonably priced, too.

The Poco M4 Pro (4G) offers excellent battery life on top of its decent specs sheet and affordable price. The 4G model packs a 90Hz OLED display and runs on the Helio G96 chipset, which is a good performer for day-to-day operations.

The cameras on the Poco M4 Pro shoot good photos and videos, as we liked the stereo speakers and the fast charging capabilities.

Overall, we’d recommend the Poco M4 Pro for its cheap price, good features, and the excellent battery life, of course.

The Poco M4 Pro 5G joins the Poco M4 Pro for its outstanding battery life. It also comes with a good 1080p 90Hz display and large battery, there are stereo speakers and fast charging, too.

The M4 Pro 5G has similar performance as the M4 Pro 4G – not bad, but not gaming-friendly either. It doesn’t have a macro camera and its base version starts with 4GB RAM. If gaming is not that important you can have an affordable 5G phone with good camera and multimedia experience and great battery life with this M4 Pro 5G.

We found the Reno7 5G (Asia) a.k.a. Find X5 Lite (Europe) to be an excellent smartphone with a well-rounded specs and a reasonable price. On top of the great battery life, the phone also offers an excellent 90Hz OLED screen, reliable performance and stability via the Dimensity 900 5G chipset, and great camera quality.

There are no stereo speakers and no ingress protection on this Oppo and these are probably the only caveats we can find on this phone. It is available under different name on different continents, but the fact remains – an excellent value for money offer with superb battery life.

The Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max managed to ace our battery life test and it had to be on this list. It has a sturdy design, one outstanding display (now with Dynamic Island) and unmatched performance, plus - its triple camera is one of the best options there are right now, especially if video capturing is a priority.

The Apple iOS is not for everyone, and the fast charging is not that fast - this means it's not all good news for the iPhone. Still, for its great endurance rating and flagship traits, it deserves a spot on the list.

The Realme GT2 is a flagship-grade smartphone with a top-notch display, excellent performance, reliable camera experience, and incredibly fast charging.

The Realme GT2 has no ingress protection and its updates over the regular GT model are marginal, but it is a good offers with excellent battery life for this flagship chipset and we do recommend putting it on your shortlist if you are after both gaming performance and battery life.

Both the Galaxy A52s and the Galaxy A53 have similar battery life, but the A52s is the better smartphone for its faster chipset and richer connectivity package. Unfortunately, the A52s stock will be gone soon, if not already, and that’s why we cannot include it here. We can still recommend its Galaxy A53 successor, though.

The Galaxy A53 is a very good offer – it is competitively priced and offers IP67-rated design, a great 120Hz Super AMOLED screen, snappy performance with 5G, a reliable versatile camera setup with OIS.

The Galaxy A53 supports up to 25W fast charging, but the charger is sold separately. The missing Wi-Fi 6 and audio jack from the A52s are baffling. But even with these, it is one solid allrounder and deserves a spot on this list.

The Poco M5s is an excellent all-around phone for its nearly entry-level pricing - splash-resistant design, AMOLED screen with high brightness, gaming-friendly chipset, versatile camera, and a large battery with fast charging.

There are some nice perks like stereo speakers, audio jack, IR blaster, FM radio, 3.5mm jack. And we were surprised by its good selfies and selfie portraits; even expensive Xiaomi phones cannot match these features. All these niceties for around €200 make the M5s a killer offer.

Of course, the Poco M5s is not perfect - it offers poor photo quality, and the 60Hz refresh rate for the display may be dealbreakers for many. But even with these two imperfections, we still recommend the Poco M5s for being one of the most feature-rich smartphones within its price bracket, one with an outstanding battery life, too.

A quick look at the specs sheet and the GT Neo 3 150W pricing suggests that it's a device easy to recommend. It has a potent, modern chipset on board, great display, unmatched charging, dependable battery life and good main camera performance. If only it had a better auxiliary camera setup, it would have been our go-to phone in the price bracket.

Sure, the battery life isn’t stellar even if the onscreen times are rather solid. But with a record-breaking charging speed (a full charger in 16mins!), you don’t need a record-breaking battery life, do you?