Dynamic clocking is present in the display’s firmware, reducing the refresh rate of the panel when static content is being displayed, in an attempt to reduce power consumption. There’s also some clever manipulation of display brightness to ensure it’s as low as possible while still being readable, plus a typical power saving mode that gets activated when the battery level falls below 30%. Generally speaking, during my time using the LG G3 as a daily driver, the battery life wasn’t bad at all, but at the same time it wasn’t outstanding. Depending on my screen on time and usage I tended to end the day with around 25-30% of the battery’s juice remaining, which is a fair result but not in the same bracket as the G2 was. Our typical battery benchmark will give a better look at the G3’s battery life, starting with the video playback test.
In this test you can easily see the battery life reduction from the G2 to the G3: the G3 performed 23% worse, even though the Snapdragon 801 is more efficient at video playback than the Snapdragon 800.
It’s a similar story for Wi-Fi and LTE browsing. The G3 performs around the same level as last year’s Sony Xperia Z1, which didn’t have awful battery life, but was soundly beaten by its competition. To last around 2 hours less than the Galaxy S5 is obviously a concern, although at least it wasn’t as poor as the HTC One.
GFXBench shows how taxing it is to render at 1440p on a large display, lasing an estimated two and a half hours in intensive 3D gaming.
Thanks to Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, the LG G3 charged very quickly, as expected.
