Deciding on which smartphone to buy is no easy task. We all need a phone with top-notch performance and a capable camera for our Instagram vanity snaps, but a smartphone’s battery life is an increasingly important factor. No matter how excellent your brand-new phone is, it’s not much use to anyone if you’re always having to charge it up.

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When making your decision, it’s best to look at battery size (measured in mAh) to give you a bit of an indication of how long-lasting the phone is expected to be. Other factors such as display size and resolution and power efficiency still play a massive part, too. But, the times of guessing are over – we’ve got you covered when it comes to the phones with the best battery life.

Every single phone that passes through our doors is faced with our in-house battery-life test. As such, we know exactly which phones you need to consider when making your next purchase if battery life is at the top of your agenda. Below, we’ve ranked the top 20 best phone battery lives of 2020, including those pricey flagships and forgotten about budget alternatives.

Best phone battery life 2020: How we test

To find out how well your phone performs against its rivals, we’ve placed all of our battery scores from our hundreds of smartphone tests conducted every year and crammed them into one easy-to-use graph, so you can see which phones are the best battery performers.

To measure a smartphone’s battery life, we run a continuous video-playback test. The video file includes a handful of scenes from Spider-Man 2, encoded to H.264, and looped to a 20-hour length. We use the MX Player app on either Google Play or the Apple App Store to play the file and record the length of time played on reboot. We also set the phone to airplane mode, turn off any automatic brightness and sleep settings, and set the screen brightness to a standardized 170cd/m2.

Airplane mode switches off all of the phone’s wireless features – naturally, extending battery life – which means that our tests are repeatable and consistent. The big problem with wireless is that signal strength can come and go, which forces the phone to adjust the amount of power that it uses constantly, causing variable results.

Best phone battery life 2020: Results

As you can see from the graph below, smartphone battery life, despite stagnating a little in recent years, has rapidly improved. All 20 phones in our hierarchy reached over 22 hours in our battery benchmark before needing to recharge (bar one) and a significant chunk of the most recent headsets (which make up most of the list) seriously outdo their predecessors.

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The Lenovo P2 has been the king of the bunch for over three years, remaining unopposed with its 28-hour battery life – although sadly it’s no longer on sale and can only be found through third-party resellers for silly prices.

Regardless, this is the benchmark for all new releases to aspire to. In second place is the newly-launched OnePlus 8 at 26hrs 47mins, which is particularly impressive when you consider the fancy 90Hz screen. Lagging slightly behind is Huawei’s Mate 10 (which is getting on a bit) at 26hrs 43mins. One of the cheapest phones on this list, the Moto G7 Power squeezes into fourth place at 26hrs 22mins.

Samsung is dominating the top 20 list with a total of six smartphones, with the Galaxy A90 5G, Galaxy A70, Galaxy S10 Lite, and Galaxy S20 Ultra all making their first appearance.

Xiaomi – after quietly gaining household appreciation in recent times – is also storming the charts, with a total of three phones, just like Motorola. Apple fails to make the cut, although its battery life is steadily improving, and I’ve added a separate iPhone section at the bottom of this article.

We have four 5G phones on the list. Firstly, there’s the aforementioned Galaxy A90 5G and OnePlus 8, which both did very well in our tests, and the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G also makes an appearance at 13th place. The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra – the priciest of Samsung’s new flagship lineup – can be found in 17th place. This does come with a caveat, however, as you can’t expect similar levels of stamina as soon as you switch on data connections – 5G is quite a power hog according to our testing.

Best phone battery life 2020: iPhone results

As I mentioned earlier, not a single iPhone manages to make an appearance in our overall battery life chart, so I’ve decided to make a separate section for fans of Apple who might be curious to find out which iPhone reaches the top of the podium.

Historically speaking, not a single iPhone has managed to compete with the likes of Android, but things are steadily improving. As the below chart proves, the longest-lasting Apple phone is the recent iPhone 11 Pro Max, which reached a total of 20hrs 7mins in our testing. That’s a very good result, and while it might be just shy of our overall top 20 list, it’s encouraging news for the future of iPhone.

I’ve ordered this graph in a slightly different way, instead of listing them in release order. As you can see, despite a few stumbles along the way, iPhone battery life is generally improving. Note: we began our standardized battery testing in 2013, so there isn’t any data before the iPhone 5C, and neither is there any data for the iPhone 7 Plus because our tests failed to run during our review.