In today’s smartphone world, handsets compete for the attention of the smartphone-buying public by coming with every bell and whistle that a prospective buyer can ever ask for. Connectivity options, big-ass displays, fire-breathing components under the hood and a whole lot more – all of these combine to make a handset desirable in the eyes of every person wanting a cool handset in his pocket. All of these though come at a heavy price – the battery life of today’s smartphones have considerable gone down compared to the handsets we played with from yesteryears.
And with the LG Nexus 4 hitting the shelves just a couple of weeks back and instantly becoming a hit that easily sold out within just a couple of hours, it is only fair that we get an idea just how the latest Google flagship device stack up in terms of its battery life. After all, it is already a given that the handset will come with bleeding-edge components in its internals. What we want to know though at this point in time is how the battery pack of the handset can provide the needed juice to power all the operations of the LG Nexus 4. We put the LG Nexus 4 through a series of real-world scenarios that tested the mettle of its 2100 mAh power pack and we share with you the results below.
As is always the case, we tested the capability and lasting power of the LG Nexus 4 in handling voice calls using our talk time test. With the quad-core processor of the handset running on idle the whole time, the LG Nexus 4 was able to make use of its ample battery supply to post a very good talk time of 14 hours and 17 minutes. Next up, the web browsing test. The LG Nexus 4 easily overshadowed its predecessor by raking up a total of 4 hours and 34 minutes during the web browsing test but some say that is rather poor when compared to the iPhone 5 which managed to last for almost 10 hours on a single charge.
The video playback test was a bit disappointing for the LG Nexus 4 though because a fully charged power pack was brought down to just 10% in approximately 4 hours and 55 minutes. Putting the handset through our endurance test, the Google developer handset managed to last for 32 hours on standby before its juice finally got squeezed out. This simply means that there is a big chance that you will run to an outlet at the end of each day to charge the LG Nexus 4 for use on the morrow.
Granted, the LG Nexus 4 is not a Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD in terms of battery life but Google could have put more effort in ensuring that the battery life of the LG Nexus 4 lasted longer. After all, the handset is not designed for just talking and people nowadays use their phones a whole lot less for calls and texts. Which brings us to another matter of importance – if Google knew that the LG Nexus 4 wouldn’t do that great in terms of battery life, then why the decision to slap it with a non-user replaceable battery in the first place? Which is a story for another day.
