Wesley's Tool-Box

I've been doing a comparison test of battery life between iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 5S for a few days. While that was happening, a bit of brouhaha over how iPhone 6 and 6 Plus supposedly bends in your pocket had been circulating the internet. It turned out that the whole thing was overblown as I suspected, and I already pointed out that it was okay to put it in the front pockets in general even before this so-called "bendgate / bendghazi" rolled in.

In any case, my belt cases work quite well. I try to use both phones identically when doing battery life comparison, so I have to have them carried around as close to me as possible. So I had my iPhone 5S strapped to my left side, while the 6 Plus took up my right side as you can see here. No worries about bending, and easy to get it out quickly, too. In normal times, I simply have one less iPhone on my waist.


As for the charging comparison side of things, Apple decided to save a bit of money on the charger. Although iPhone 6 Plus has nearly twice the battery charge as the previous models, it still ships with the same 5W charger. This is similar to how iPad mini ships with a 5W one instead of a 10W or 12W one like the "normal" iPads.

It's disappointing that Apple opted to do this, but maybe it isn't all that bad. The only way to find out is through testing. In order to see how much of an impact a lower-powered charger would cause, I prepared both 5W and 10W Apple-branded chargers for the tests.

Even with excellent performance, lackluster battery life will tarnish the usability of a phone. It's thus natural to see if iPhone 5S has made any improvements with battery usage from the previous generation. Apple has targeted it to be at least as good as iPhone 5, so I wanted to see how the two really compares in real life use.

The official capacities are 5.45Wh (3.8V 1440mAh) for iPhone 5 and 5.92Wh (3.8V 1560mAh) for iPhone 5S, an 8.6% difference. So 5S could use a little more power and still stay even. The iPhone 5 I have has seen use for about two months, while iPhone 5S has been with me for a month. So both have relatively fresh batteries close to these original capacities.

With these in mind and full charge, I started using the two devices, which were running iOS 7.0.3 now, in the same manner throughout the day. This meant opening the same app and taking the same actions at the same time. It's an interesting experience, and because apparent responsiveness of the two devices are similar at casual use, it wasn't too difficult to carry out.

To even the playfield further, push notifications, push data and automatic app updates were disabled, while screen brightness was fixed to 33%, which is good for indoor use. WiFi and Bluetooth were both enabled, but not used, so LTE was responsible for data. Other settings like GPS and visual effects were kept on by default. So how did the draining of the battery turn out?