Galaxy S 4 has best battery life, iPhone 5s well behind

Has meager battery life on your iPhone left you feeling drained? You're probably not alone. Some new tests show that Apple's latest smartphone may not actually be the juiciest device on the market. In fact, it may not even be in the top five.

According to consumer review blog Which?, the Samsung Galaxy S 4, HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini all ranked higher than the iPhone 5s when it came to talk time, with the S4 clocking in at 1051 minutes and the new iPhone at 651. 

For battery life during Internet use, the 5s is ranked even lower, at number seven. The S4 was again number one at 405 minutes, but phones like BlackBerry's Z10 and Nokia's Lumia 1020 also beat out the iPhone 5s and 5c here (rated at 298 and 252 minutes respectively).

At the launch of the iPhone 5s, some reviews and tests revealed the iPhone 5s as, though packing a slightly larger battery, offering about the same daily rate of drain as last year's iPhone 5. Technology site AnandTech put Apple's newest phone through a rigorous series of tests and found it to be lagging behind several phones on the market in a WiFi web browsing time test - including the iPhone 5 - though it was the leader of the pack in the LTE web browsing time test. In a similar testing of talk time on the iPhone 5s, AnandTech ranked the device 9th behind seven Android smartphones, as well as Apple's own iPhone 5c.

For what it's worth, the trials AnandTech conducted show the Samsung Galaxy S 4, a device Which? tagged as number one, well back in the pack in both the web browsing and talk time tests.

So, what do all these numbers and rankings mean? We're not going to pretend to know which device will undoubtedly offer the best battery life for your day to day, though taken together these two studies do paint a picture of the battery-power landscape among current smartphones.

There is an obvious portability vs battery size trade off with mobile devices, as pointed out in the piece by Which?, but users are seemingly catching on to this, with some crying "enough already" with thinner devices if it means sacrificing battery life. The size of the 1570 mAh battery on the iPhone 5s pales in comparison to the 2600 mAh the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is fitted with. 

But, with continued rumors swirling of a larger screened and larger bodied iPhone in the hopper for Apple, perhaps a bigger battery will finally be worked in (though a larger display also likely means more power consumption.)