Benchmarks Need to Represent Actual Usage ⇥ birchtree.me
The results of our battery tests revealed that autonomy was largely impacted by this always-on screen feature, draining the battery about 4 times faster! The battery will last roughly 100 hours in idle when activating the feature, instead of 400 if the feature is deactivated. […]
Well, this test was done with the phones in airplane mode, all wireless connections were disabled, and the phones were never used. In other words, they’ve eliminated all other battery drains from the phone and left just the screen. This is a perfect example of a bad benchmark, in my opinion, as it gives you a comparison that feels scientific, but tells you nothing of value.
If you use your phone without any of its telephony features, then perhaps you, too, could see a fourfold improvement in its battery life. I read the original article and I am struggling to understand the point of running this benchmark without any additional context. Without a followup test investigating real-world conditions, these are merely some context-free numbers — hardly a useful test.