Motorola DROID Turbo battery life test: nowhere near 2-days, but still pretty great

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Motorola DROID Turbo battery life test: nowhere near 2-days, but still pretty great

We’re getting ready to charge up our newly purchased Motorola DROID Turbo for the day, but before we do, we wanted to share some personal battery life stats with you. By now we’ve all heard Motorola and Verizon’s claims of 2-day battery life on the Turbo, one of the reasons we rushed out to buy the phone on day 1. So, just how true are those claims? Well, as to be expected they’re a bit overly optimistic, we didn’t get anywhere near the 2-day battery life as advertised but what we did get wasn’t all that bad either.

After about 21 hours, our battery life was down to around 17% and still kicking. We know. On the surface, that doesn’t sound too great considering the DROID Turbo is outfitted with a substantially large 3,900mAh battery but here is another factor to consider: our screen on time was a little over 5 hours.

Now, we’re not big phablet users but coming from a reasonably sized smartphone that is absolutely unheard of in our experience. Typically we only see around 2 hours of screen on time (full brightness) from most of our Android devices with light or normal usage before they die out in the same amount of time. With the DROID Turbo, we were doing quite a lot with it (installing apps, playing video games, streaming YouTube, taking pictures, loading Imgur). It’s not extremely heavy usage, but definitely more than we’d do on a “regular” device where battery life is always something you keep in the back of your mind (“Should I watch this YouTube video? Nah, better wait until I plug in just in case“).

One more factor to consider is we we had the brightness on nearly full blast the entire time we were using the DROID Turbo. And while battery life will never, ever, be the same for any 2 people (we know, you get 2 days of battery life on your old MyTouch 4G with blah blah screen on time whoop-dee-doo), we wanted to give you a ballpark figure of what to expect from the Motorola DROID Turbo should battery life be a major deciding factor in your smartphone purchases. Our guess for why battery life isn’t all that groundbreaking? The phone’s overkill 1440p display. We can only wonder how things would have looked on the Moto X with the same sized battery.

Keep in mind we still have our full review coming soon, in which we’ll be sure to take into account multiple charging cycles and report back our findings. Stay tuned!

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