There's no question about which phone to turn to when you want the device with the best phone battery life. The newly announced Asus ROG Phone 7 blows away the competition, outlasting our previous battery life champ by a little more than 3 hours, making the gaming phone the longest-lasting phone we've ever tested.
Every smartphone we review goes through our battery test, in which we set a phone to continuously surf the web over a cellular connection until it runs out of power. The average smartphone gives up the ghost just shy of the 10 hour mark. A time greater than 11.5 hours is the mark of a truly long-lasting handset.
The Asus ROG Phone 7 gaming phone lasted a total of 18 hours and 32 minutes. In terms of real-world use, that translates to multi-day battery life before you'll need to charge your phone.
We should note that we reached that number with the ROG Phone 7's adaptive refresh rate set to auto, meaning the phone would automatically ramp up its refresh rate to 165Hz when it determined that a user would benefit from smoother scrolling and scale back down again when the on-screen activity was more static.
When we locked in the refresh rate at 165Hz, there was a predictable toll on battery life — but even then, the ROG Phone 7 held out for 13 hours and 23 minutes. That time would still land it third on our list of long-lasting phones behind last year's ROG Phone 6 Pro and the iPhone 14 Pro Max.
In other words, Asus has built yet another long-lasting device in the ROG Phone 7.
One other note — technically, we tested the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, a more expensive version of the $999 ROG Phone 7. However, apart from more RAM in the Ultimate and some notable design differences on the back of the two gaming phones, these are essentially the same device with identical battery, display and chipset specs. The results we got for the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate should also reflect how long the ROG Phone 7 lasts on a charge.
Impressive charging speeds, too
So what's the secret to the ROG Phone 7's success? Start with a massive battery — or rather, two batteries that add up to a big reserve of power. Asus equips its gaming phone with a pair of 3,000 mAh power packs, which adds up to a single 6,000 mAh power source. The battery is split in two so that it produces less heat during lengthy bursts of gaming while still giving the ROG Phone 7 enough juice to last a long time on a charge.
The ROG Phone 7 also benefits from the power efficiency of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. The top-of-the-line Qualcomm silicon has proven especially beneficial for smartphone battery life, at least in our testing. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and OnePlus 11 run on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as well, and both join the ROG Phone 7 on our list of long-lasting smartphones to come out in the last 18 months.
The Galaxy S23 Plus also features that same chipset and just misses out on making the top 15, with a battery life of 11 hours and 24 minutes. So look for a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset if you want a phone that can go all day on a charge.
One other aspect of the ROG Phone 7's power management features deserves a shout-out — the phone's fast-charging capabilities. The Asus phone supports 65W charging, and while that's not as blazingly fast as the 80W speeds the OnePlus 11 offers, it's still very fast.
When we charged a drained ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, we were able to get the device back to a 69% charge after 30 minutes. The Galaxy S23 Ultra, which supports 45W charging, only reached 57%, while the iPhone 14 Pro Max hit just 42% due to its pokey 20W speeds.
Put another way, the ROG Phone 7 doesn't just last a long time, it's also quick to recharge. If that's not the makings of the most impressive phone we've ever tested when it comes to battery life and charging, we don't know what is.
