Nexus 5 battery life first impressions: Good enough, but not great

How does the Nexus 5's battery stand up after a few days of real-world use?

Battery life is one of those areas of smartphone performance thats difficult to quantify. Synthetic tests rarely reflect real-world performance, and it takes time to get a feel for how a new phone stands up.

Weve been using the Nexus 5 as our daily driver for the past few days just about long enough to get a good idea of how the battery performs in regular day-to-day use. In a word or two its good enough. Acceptable. OK, but not great. And certain tasks in particular seem to draw an inordinately large amount of juice from the phones 2300mAh reserves.

Well take a closer look after the break.

During our first full day of testing the Nexus 5, we managed just over 12 hours of moderate-to-heavy use before hitting the 19 percent warning level. Thats with mixed use consisting of browsing and social app use over Wifi and HSPA+, heavy use of the camera, a little music streaming over Google Play Music and a couple of brief phone calls. We had Google+ Photo Backup and Dropbox auto-upload enabled during our testing, but only set to kick in when connected to Wifi. By the early evening around 9 hours in we were approaching 35 percent charge remaining. With more conservative use in the evening we managed to push it to 12 hours before connecting the charger. Thats about average for an Android smartphone. Good enough, but some way off being great.

Subsequent days have reinforced our findings the Nexus 5 has great idle performance, but guzzles down juice with the screen on. Its not surprising that using your phone takes more power than not using it, but that effect seems to be amplified on the Nexus 5. Today were at 45 percent remaining with nine hours of mixed use, and you can clearly see the fast drop-off in charge while the screen was on and the CPU was churning for long periods of time.

The Nexus 5s camera in particular seems to be a massive battery sink. Around an hour of snapping photos on-and-off was enough to consume a quarter of our devices charge. Same deal with heavy web browsing and app use over HSPA+. Androids built-in battery monitor calls out the display as the biggest battery hog and thats not surprising. The Nexus 5 (and KitKat in general, it seems) ramps up its brightness more aggressively than previous versions when set to auto which is a good thing for visibility and display quality, but not so great for longevity.

The phones built-in wireless charging capabilities are also worth mentioning, especially if youre working at a desk for long periods. The Nexus 5 works with Qi-compatible chargers, so plopping the phone down on a wireless charging pad while youre not using it is a great way to make sure youre always topped up while indoors. What its absolutely not, however, is a substitute for a larger-capacity battery.

Well continue to test out the Nexus 5 this week, as we prepare our full review, and well have more to say on battery life in the days ahead. For now we can safely say the phones longevity is comparable to the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus, but certainly no better. And we cant help but be just a little disappointed by that.

More coverage

• Nexus 5 video walkthrough
• Nexus 5 camera first impressions
• Evenmore Nexus 5

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