Android Battery test
Recently my son questioned whether or not he needed to replace the battery in his Samsung S6 because he was having difficulty getting through the day with a single charge. The cost to replace the battery is on the order of $60, and we wanted to try to decide whether or not the existing battery was weak. The Samsung battery analyzer indicated that the batter is good, but we decided to perform a quantitative test. We have three Samsung S6 phones in our household so we devised a simple test, using Flashlight+, a free App. Here is a description of our test:
Starting with nearly-charged phones, we recorded the initial percent charges, and we used the Flashligh+ App to turn on the flashlights. We waited about 30 minutes, and recorded the percent charges again. Then we turned the flashlights back on, and recorded the percent charge after another half hour or so.
This should be a pretty good test, assuming that the Flashlight+ app consumes virtually all of the total battery discharge whenever the flashlight is on.
The following results are for our three Samsung S6 phones. The first two phones were purchased new about two years ago. Both were manufactured for use with AT&T, but they are used wit Consumer Cellular as our provider. The third phone was recently purchased used. It is a T-mobile phone.
Time 0 min 35 min 58 min
MRI 100% 58% charge (42% depleted) 33% charge (67% depleted)
GAI 100% 66% charge (34% depleted) 43% charge (57% depleted)
DBI 95% 61% charge (34% depleted) 37% charge (58% depleted)
On the basis of this small sample, two phones lost about 60 percent of their charge per hour. The third phone lost about 70 percent. We have tentatively concluded that it is probably not cost-effective to have the batteries replaced in any of these phones yet, but would be interesting to hear about results from other users.