The Ultimate 2026 Battery Test

Welcome to the 2026 edition of How Little Sleep Am I Going to Get Tonight? So, I'm about to spend my entire day looking at battery percentages and we are off. But this time, we're doing it differently. We're going to compare the best phones from all the top companies. So, that's the Samsung S26 Ultra, iPhone 17 Pro Max, Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, OnePlus 15, Oppo FindX 9 Pro, Xiaomi 17 Ultra, and last year's Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra just to make sure that newer actually is better. And while we're looking at batteries, we'll also run a performance test to see which phone is fastest, while a new $35,000 thermal camera baked into our rig will show us how hot each phone is getting as we're going. So, that's our morning workout done. Why not treat ourselves to a little Instagram slop? And I got to say, a big part of the reason that I wanted to make this test in the first place is I'm worried Samsung hasn't upgraded the battery capacity on their Ultra in the last 6 years. We've had like three different Batman. We've had 3 and 1/2 prime ministers, but we haven't had a 1 mAh increase to Samsung's battery, which means we're at a stage now where two very clear groups have formed. The betas, let's call them, which is Samsung with a 5,000 mAh battery, the iPhone with 4,823, and then the Google Pixel with 5,200, and then the alphas, which absolutely trounce these betas on paper. So, that's Xiaomi with a 6,800 mAh capacity, OnePlus with 7,300, and Oppo with 7,500. The point being that there's one of two things happening here. Either Samsung's new 2026 flagship is about to get absolutely creamed by a lot of its rivals, or Samsung's figured out how to make much less battery go for just as long as it other brands. And honestly, either of those conclusions would be noteworthy. And so far, let's just move across quickly to the Pokémon card app to find out importantly which phone can bag us the rarest pull. It doesn't look like this S26 Ultra is flopping. It's actually ahead of the Google Pixel, which has a slightly bigger battery. And shockingly, actually ahead of the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which was meant to be one of the Giga Chad alphas of this group. But this is early. Some of this could just be the way that different phones report their battery percentages. And then leading the pack is Oppo with 94%. That's a bit nutty considering it's been 2 hours already. Oh, of course. Well, to add insult to injury, Oppo is also the luckiest bone of the bunch. That's by far the rarest card. So, we've now been running this medium inensity app for an hour and a half. Let's switch over to thermal view. We'll do this again later when we're pushing the phones to their limit. But even with this very normal load, you can absolutely see the effect on temperatures. The whiter an area looks, the hotter it is. And so, just look how much hotter the phones that we're testing are compared to the timer phone, the true MVP of every battery test. What's even more interesting, though, is the differences between the other phones. Like, can you see how the first two, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and the iPhone 17 Pro Max, they are significantly cooler than the others with their hottest zones barely touching 27° C. Interestingly, these are actually the two phones that just this generation have switched the material of their frames from titanium to the more heat conductive aluminium. And then the rest all have areas that go just above 32° C, particularly the Google Pixel, which is covered in white. Now, you might be thinking, why do I care if my phone gets warm? Well, the warmer that your phone gets, the more that your performance is going to tank, the faster your battery is going to deplete, and the more that the battery is going to degrade in the long term. Bear in mind these are temperatures with the room being set to a very cool controlled 17°C. Now after a fairly unproductive morning to say the least, it's about time we clock in and lock in on Slack. Say something about the Samsung S26 Ultra. Well, this can only go well. I've just noticed a gap is appearing between this new Samsung and the previous gen Samsung. Even though the battery capacity is the same, it does look like the nextG chip combined with the seemingly improved thermal performance might actually be translating to a result that matters. Bear in mind, too, that the new phone is also running the latest Samsung software. So, there can be some efficiency improvements bundled into that. But, okay, we've seen now what the thermals look like when you're just going about your day, but what happens to them when you push the limits? So, first, let's get a proper game going. This is Weathering Waves, and it's about as taxing as mobile games get. also random. But notice even though I'm opening each app from left to right, the Google Pixel is by far the slowest at loading. It's definitely chugging behind and struggling already. But we're all in now. So, we'll leave these running for an hour on this and see where we get to. Okay, that was a fast hour for you, but I'm reaching the stage where I can close my eyes and still see seven brightly lit rectangles embedded into my retinas. And now that our phones have been pushed, let's see how fast they're still able to perform and exactly how hot they get in the process. So this is Geekbench to test the CPUs. I'm running this three times fully and then we'll use the results of the third run. Oh, this is interesting. So look, the Google Pixel is the hottest phone at the start, but then as the benchmarks go on, you can see it changing. Not because the Google gets cooler, but because the Oppo seems to have just had enough. That phone very quickly becomes by far the hottest phone, reaching 42° C. Still not hot enough to burn you, but absolutely hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold. Ooh, and also hot enough to affect its performance. So, focusing on the single core score, cuz that's the best indicator of snappiness with daily tasks, there's I'd say two key takeaways. One, the OPPO is an outlier. If you look at every other current gen phone, let's ignore the Pixel for a minute, their results are squarely in the mid to high 3000s, but this phone's only getting 3,184. The likely reason being the key thing that's different about the OPPO, which is that this phone is powered by a MediaTek chip instead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. So, it does feel like when push comes to shove, Snapdragon is still on top in the Android world. But the second observation is that while dayto-day I've never noticed performance feeling lacking on the Oppo, I absolutely have on the Google Pixel. And that well and truly reflects in this result. This is the lowest performing phone on the whole table. And that includes last year's Samsung S25 Ultra. And honestly, it's not even like it's close to that phone. I think it would lose to an S24 at this point. And that is just a bit deflating really because honestly I love using the Google Pixel camera and Google software skin is to this day still my favorite way to experience Android. But you know something is wrong when your performance is like two to three generations behind. Your phone still runs hotter than most others. All paired with by far the worst performing battery. Even though you have technically a larger capacity than Samsung, the thing's only got 30% left. Oh, and if you ever wondered what happens if you just open up Gemini and give it no context on what to talk about, well, it turns out the AI will just spend the entire time saying bye to itself. On loop, you enjoy your evening. You too. You're welcome. You too. Have a great time. Have a great night. Right, it's been 7 and 1/2 hours now. If my brain was cooked before, it is deep fried at this point. So, let's start to wrap this test up with some content. I've been meaning to watch the surprisingly good Super Mario movie again in preparation for the new one. Oh, wait. It's not available on Netflix in the UK. It's okay, though, because instead of dishing out like an extra $10 a month for a Sky subscription just to watch it, why don't we just dip into Surf Shark VPN, our sponsor, virtually fly over to Mexico, where the movie is available. And if we then try Netflix, magically, there he is, a little mustached plumber himself. So, we'll just let the entire movie play out to see what that does to battery. And if you head to surfshock.com/boss, you can get Surf Shark for $2 a month with an extra 4 months for free for as many accounts as you want. But now it's time to answer the most important question. We've talked about how Samsung, Apple, and Google, they all have these beta 5,000 mAhish batteries right next to all these Chinese flagships which have like 7,000. Now, that difference is because the Chinese phones are using silicon carbon techch, which is just more energy dense than traditional lithium ion. But the question then is why? Why then are Samsung, Apple, and Google choosing not to use it? And you'll have noticed, by the way, that there's something quite odd happening with the Xiaomi in this test. It's not lasting close to as long as its ultra high capacity battery suggested it should, but that's not actually a mistake. That's the key to answering what I think is going on. So, Google, Samsung, and Apple, especially those latter two, they sell their phones all across the world. And a lot of those phones are sold in regions that have tight controls on high-capacity batteries. Any single cell that's too big is either just straight up not allowed or at the very least becomes more expensive to ship and handle. So it is definitely tougher to make a global phone that has an ultra high capacity battery than it is to make one for just China, for example. And that's actually why this Xiaomi is underperforming. On paper, this battery capacity is 6,800 mAh. But you can tell from how it's doing that Xiaomi has clearly had to add a restriction to that cell in order to ship it to lots of countries. So, you're not actually getting the best out of that battery. That said, it's not impossible to get the best of both because what the OnePlus and the Oppo have done is two batteries, two smaller silicon carbon batteries, which gives you that ultra high capacity overall while staying under the capacity limits for any one individual cell. But that costs more to implement, which to me feels like the likely real reason that some companies are avoiding. But clearly, this solution delivers. The only other potential option I can think is Samsung is particularly worried about jumping head first into new battery tech because of you know the thing that happened and that is now finally every single phone dead. So how do they do? Well in seventh place it's the Google Pixel. Enough said about this one. I think it's too much of a compromise on key smartphone pillars for me to recommend. Sixth is last year's S25 Ultra that we love to see cuz we know that already that was a great phone for battery life. So to see it now buried in sixth position just shows how incredible today's options are. Fifth then and lasting quite a lot longer than the S25 Ultra was Xiaomi and the company's quoting that this global variant will have about 6,000 mAh of usable battery. But I got hold of two of these and on both phones the estimated battery I'm seeing is anywhere between 5,400 and 5,800. Fourth place is the iPhone, which I mean only lasted about 5 minutes longer than the Xiaomi, but still this is an amazing result considering that it's working with the smallest battery capacity of the whole bunch and that right now the one we're using is the smaller battery UK version of the phone. So, if you're in the US and you'll be buying the eim only variant, you could expect another 6% of juice on top of that. In third place, then S26 Ultra, which at 12 hours is like sick. I wasn't expecting to see any improvement over last year, but I guess the combo of more efficient chip with better cooling is doing the Lord's work. Now, obviously, OnePlus was a huge step above even that, just shy of 13 hours. And technically, it didn't even die then. That's just the moment that it entered its super power saving mode, which is actually a great way to prolong your last 1% while keeping core phone functionality. Which leaves the winner by bit of a landslide really as OPPO. Not the best phone for thermal performance, but as far as endurance goes, you cannot fault 14 hours and 16 minutes on a test this intensive with that same super power saving protection built in as OnePlus. Okay, good night.