The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is one of the latest and greatest smartphones that is currently available and sporting a number of high profile specs and a premium build to beat. That said, one of the features which has been under speculation with all the 2015 Samsung flagship smartphones is that of battery life. Samsung, once famous for their removable battery approach, chose this year to load all their main smartphones with non-removable batteries. This in itself caused some controversy and with the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge sporting 2,550 and 2600 mAh battery respectively, some felt the battery life on offer was not a good as it could or should have been on devices of this level and from such a company as Samsung. The Galaxy Note range has always been iconic in coming with larger batteries although when it came to the Galaxy Note 5 (which sports a 3,000 mAh battery), this one is actually smaller than the 3,220 mAh capacity battery that comes equipped on the Galaxy Note 4. Which may be a cause of concern for some.
Of course, the Galaxy Note 5 does come with wireless fast charging, although to make use of these sorts of features, you do need to have the relevant accessories which are sold as aftermarket purchases. But what if you just want to buy the device and use the charger that comes with the device? How will the battery hold up under these ‘normal’ conditions? Well, we took a quick look at the out of the box battery usage of the Galaxy Note 5. For background, the Galaxy Note 5 was used on Verizon Wireless and mainly on WiFi (although 4G was constantly turned on as well) and with the brightness set to the default automatic level.
When used in an absolute minimal state, the battery offered a total usage of one day and seventeen hours before full depletion. To clarify, this was in an almost endless standby mode with screen on time literally not registering at all on the battery stats page. Therefore, this was assumed to be the maximize you could get from the Galaxy Note 5 battery with absolute minimal use.
In contrast, when trying to purposely drain the battery, as quickly as possible (mainly by streaming videos from either YouTube or Play Movies, as well as surfing and some music playback), the battery still managed to last a decent amount of time with roughly 6 hours of screen on time.
Moving to the charging side of things and this area also performed relatively well on the Galaxy Note 5. Once the battery had initially depleted, we tested the ’15 minute charge’ and after the quick 15 minute charge, the battery jumped from 5-percent up to 28-percent, resulting in a 23-percent increase.
In terms of the usage from this increase, again adopting an emergency approach to the battery usage (i.e. only checking emails once an hour and very occasional lights surfing), the increase of battery life offered just under seven hours of usage from the 15 minute fast charge.
For those interested, using the normal out of the box charger, the Galaxy Note 5 would take approximately eighty minutes to refill the battery. So overall, in spite of the Galaxy Note 5 coming with a smaller battery than the previous generation device, it does seem to hold up well during daily usage and without having to purchase any additional hardware. Using more heavily, you can expect anywhere from 4-6 hours of screen on time and easily getting through daily use on more moderate usage. When you do need to quickly top-up your battery level before a night out, then providing you are not heavily using the phone, you can expect anywhere up to seven hours from a quick 15 minute top up.