Phones With the Best Battery Life

Have you ever felt your cell phone vibrate and pulled it out of your pocket, expecting to to see a text or e-mail message, only to see a low-battery warning instead? Surely, you've uttered the dreaded words, “My phone is dying, so I have to say this fast!"

It may be time to consider investing in a phone with better battery life.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of carrying an extra battery or charger around, or even strapping a battery case to my phone is not all that appealing. But I’m realistic. Smartphones, with their big touch screens and fast processors, suck up a lot of power, so I’m not expecting to make it through the week on a single charge. Still, there’s no excuse for not being able to make it through the day.

For every phone we review here at PCMag we test continuous talk time, to measure just how much chatting you can do between charges. Although talk time doesn’t account for all the other ways we use our phones throughout the day, it’s still a useful indication of how long you can expect your battery to last. For most smartphones running on a 3G network, the average talk time is a little over five hours, which isn't bad. There are also a good number of phones that fall in the six-hour range, which is even better. For this list, we’re rounding up phones that delivered at least six hours—some go well beyond that—which should be more than enough juice to get you from morning to evening without a charge.