Do Foldable Phones Use More Battery Life?
Foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip and Galaxy Z Fold2 might have fancier displays but does the ability to fold come at the cost of everyday battery life?
Measuring the battery life of any smartphone, foldable or not, is something of an inexact science. As I wrote in a piece for PC World:
As with camera quality or performance, there’s no perfect way to measure battery life. Still, anecdotal experience is usually a good place to start. How frequently do you have to charge up? As with performance, it’s often the case that a device either has enough battery life that you forget to worry about battery life or it doesn’t. You want to make a determination about which of those two extremes the device falls closer towards.
Some basic math here. If you put two differently sized but otherwise identical displays side by side, the larger one will draw the most power because it is outputting a greater amount of light.
In that strictly foundational sense, a larger foldable will burn through more energy than a smaller non-foldable device. However, the display on both foldable and non-foldable phones isn’t always active nor is it the only factor.
The clock speed of the processor, your connectivity settings, the refresh rate, the number of apps being run in the background and the physical size of the battery inside any device can affect battery life as much as — if not more than — whether or not the screen bends.
That being said, foldable phones do have two key advantages when it comes to battery life. Firstly, and especially when it comes to stuff like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold2 and Huawei’s Mate Xs, foldable phones tend to be physically larger than non-foldables and thus can accommodate larger and dual-cell battery designs. This doesn’t always translate into better battery life but it sometimes can.
The other edge that foldables have here is that, since the larger screens inside them aren’t always in use, you can sometimes get away with not charging them for longer. Every time you opt to use the outer display on the Galaxy Z Fold2 rather than the inner one, you’re making a choice to consume slightly less power — since that display is the smaller one.
Ultimately, while the foldable form-factor does add some quirks to the battery life equation, the story here isn’t a radical departure from what you’ll get out of a regular smartphone. Foldable smartphones can sometimes eat through their battery life faster than the alternatives but it all depends on the circumstances.
