HTC Desire 816 battery test

The HTC Desire 816 has one of the smaller batteries of all 5.5″ smartphones, 2,600mAh. There are a couple 2,500mAh but that’s hardly an excuse. Great battery life is one of the key selling points of phablets, second only to the large screen (actually those are the two selling points), so has this hurt HTC’s second phablet?

The answer is not so much, even without the use of HTC’s power saving modes.

The talk time is the one weak spot for the Desire 816, it lasted just under 15 hours. While that may sound decent, competitors like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo and the Sony Xperia T2 Ultra last 25 hours. Those two are direct competitors in terms of specs and price.

From here on out the HTC Desire 816 posted much better results. With nearly 12 hours of web browsing, it’s one of the best devices we’ve tested though the Xperia T2 Ultra came out ahead by a few minutes, the Note 3 Neo was over two hours behind.

The video playback proved more problematic for HTC’s phablet, though with 10 and a half hours it’s still a solid result. It’s certainly in the upper segment of what pocketable devices manage, though the Samsung and Sony phablets beat it by 1 and 3 hours respectively.

Note that we run the web and video tests with the brightness slider at 50%. The HTC Desire 816 screen is quite dim at this setting, 164 nits, but the Galaxy Note 3 Neo screen only pushed out 142 nits.

The endurance rating worked out to 64 hours, meaning with average usage you’ll need to charge the phablet every 2-3 days. That’s quite good, especially considering the relatively small battery, the Xperia T2 Ultra and Galaxy Note 3 Neo have 3,000mAh and 3,100mAh respectively.

However, with a much better talk time and good scores on the other two tests the two phablets scored a higher endurance rating, the T2 Ultra in particular boasts a massive 96 hours. Given the dimensions of the Desire 816, HTC could have put in a much larger battery and made the phablet that much more competitive.