The Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL fail to take the Lumia 1520 battery life crown

Battery life is a very important element of the smartphone experience, but has become increasingly less of an issue as phone size increased, as OEMs have been able to stuff larger and larger batteries in their handsets.

At 3340 mAh the Lumia 950 XL has one of the largest batteries on a Windows phone, second only to the Lumia 1520 with its 3400 mAH battery. The Lumia 950 still has a pretty large battery at 3000 mAh. This compares very favourably to the 2420 mAh battery in the Lumia 930 for example.

The handsets of course also pack some pretty powerful battery drainers, in the form of large, very high resolution Quad HD screens, the latest Snapdragon processors and the still poorly optimised Windows 10 Mobile operating system.

GSMArena has run the handsets through their battery benchmark gauntlet and produced the following results:

Video Playback

Web Browsing

Talk Time

As can be seen from the results above, despite only having a 10% larger battery than the Lumia 950, the Lumia 950 XL performs a lot better than the 950, particularly when it comes to talk time, likely reflecting the difference between the Snapdragon 810 and 808 processors. The same significant difference is also seen in web  browsing, making it clear that choosing the smaller screen for battery life advantages would be a mistake.

Neither devices however come close to the Lumia 1520’s battery life, as can be seen in the graphs above.

The devices however in general offer similar battery life to other Windows Phones (who often have much smaller batteries) but  GSMArena notes that standby time is particularly poor at less than 7 days for both handsets, suggesting once again that the operating system needs some further work.

Does GSMArena’s results tally with the experience of our readers lucky enough to already own Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL handsets? Let us know below.