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Apple iPhone SE battery and fast-charging test

The iPhone SE is a small phone with a lot of power, but what good is power if you run out of juice after five minutes? We put the SE’s battery to the test.

In general usage, the 1624mAh cell will give up the ghost just shy of a day and half (switching it off at night: 11:30pm to 6:45am), which means power users should feel comfortable pounding the SE through a full work day without needing to worry, but no more.

To charge the battery back up, we tested it with a standard Apple Lightning lead and both the conventional iPhone adapter and a 12W/2.4 amp iPad adapter, chosen (with Apple’s consent) because it supposedly results in faster-than-conventional charging, even if the company doesn’t explicitly describe it as fast charging.

Despite the supposed additional oomph of the iPad adapter, the SE still took 2 hours 20 minutes to reach 100 per cent, exactly the same as using the in-box adapter. By comparison, that’s almost twice as long as the LG G5’s 2800mAh battery took to charge whilst using Qualcomm’s QuickCharge 3.0 technology.

Our media battery test involved streaming a YouTube video over a WiFi connection whilst the display was set at maximum brightness. The iPhone SE put up an impressive fight up in this round, lasting a staggering 9 hours and 50 minutes.

Apple iPhone SE battery test

For a small phone with a relatively small battery, it’s got some of the best battery life of any iPhone, but fast-charging and other newer technologies would have been appreciated Apple. 

You can also pick the iPhone SE up on O2 here.

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