All bow to the new endurance kings: Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact score a record battery life

We are not going to mince words here - Sony is the current king of battery life when it comes to brand-name smartphones. We did our grueling battery benchmark on the Xperia Z3 and Z3 compact over the weekend, and those two puppies broke all records in their respective categories, just as we suspected they would do, given Sony's consistent performance in that department this year.

The Xperia Z3 managed to last almost nine and a half hours with its screen on at our uniform brightness setting and with our tasking script running on it. This is more than any other flagship we've measured so far - phone or phablet - and even more than the Ascend Mate7, which comes equipped with a whopping 4100 mAh juicer, while the Z3 has an "only" 3100 mAh piece in a 7.3mm thin waterproof body.

The Z3 Compact, on the other hand, broke absolutely all records by a wide margin, scoring the out-of-this-world 14 hours and 44 minutes on our test, with its 4.6" HD display and 2600 mAh battery - that would translate to roughly three days of normal usage on a charge, and is the best result of any brand-name handset out there. Granted, Lenovo has its P780 and S860 handsets, which score in a similar way out of a 4000 mAh battery pack, but their specs are pretty low-end, while the Z3 Compact is as flagship as they come in small packages. In fact, we are currently running the test again on the Z3 Compact, just to log its score again, but other tests are reporting similar scores, and Sony itself has even marked it for the whopping 38 days on standby on a charge.

If you think that what Sony did is by accident, then a simple look at our top ten endurance champs will tell you that this is not the case. Sony phones are currently occupying six of the top ten slots in our battery benchmark ranking, and these range from low-ends, like the Xperia C, through midrangers like the slim T3, all the way to their Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact flagships. The "culprit" must be Sony's displays, which might not be the best out there when it comes to color representation and viewing angles, but are apparently using an extremely frugal technology, and screens are the pesky components with the highest battery consumption in our smartphones, so kudos to Sony here.

Battery life