Name: The Ultimate 2026 Battery Test
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T21:47:34.000Z
Duration: 11 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome to the 2026 edition of how little sleep am I going to get tonight?

Transition words & phrases

Because I'm about to spend my entire day looking at battery percentages.

But this time we're doing it differently.

We're going to compare the best phones from all the top companies.

So that's the Samsung S26 Ultra, iPhone 17 Pro Max, Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, OnePlus 15, Oppo Find X9 Pro, Xiaomi 17 Ultra, and

Just to make sure that newer actually is better.

And while we're looking at batteries, we'll also run a performance test to see which phone is fastest, While a new $3,500 thermal camera baked into our rig will show us how hot each phone is getting as we're going.

Why not treat ourselves to a little Instagram slop?

And I gotta say, a big part of the reason that I wanted to make this test in the first place is I'm worried Samsung hasn't upgraded the battery capacity on their Ultra in the last six years.

We've had like three different Batmen, we've had three and a half prime ministers, but

we haven't had a one milliamp hour to Samsung's battery.

Which means we're at a stage now where two very clear groups have formed.

The betas, let's call them, which is Samsung with a 5000 milliamp hour battery, the iPhone with 4823, and

then the Google Pixel with 5200, and then the Alphas, which absolutely trounce these betas on paper.

So that's Xiaomi with a 6800mAh capacity, OnePlus with 7300 and Oppo with 7500.

The point being that there's one of two things happening here.

Either Samsung's new 2026 flagship is about to get absolutely creamed by a lot of its rivals, or Samsung's figured out how to make much less battery go for just as long as those other brands.

And honestly, either of those conclusions would be noteworthy.

And so far, let's just move across quickly to the Pokemon card app to find out importantly, which phone can bag us the rarest pull.

It doesn't look like this S26 Ultra is flopping.

It's actually ahead of the Google Pixel, which has a slightly bigger battery, and shockingly, actually

ahead of the Xiaom, which was meant to be one of the Gigachad Alphas of this group.

Some of this could just be the way that different phones report their battery percentages.

And then leading the pack is oppo with 94%.

That's a bit nutty considering it's been two hours already.

Well, to add insult to injury, Oppo is also the luckiest phone of the bunch.

So we've now been running this medium intensity app for an hour and a half.

We'll do this again later when we're pushing the phone to their limit.

But even with this very normal load, you can absolutely see the effect on temperatures.

The whiter an area looks, the hotter it is.

And so just look how much hotter the phones that we're testing are compared to the timer phone, the true MVP of every battery test.

What's even more interesting though is the differences between the other phones.

Like can you see how the first two, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and the iPhone 17 Pro Max, they are significantly cooler than the others with their hottest zones barely touching 27 degrees C.

Interestingly, these are actually the two phones that just this generation have switched the material of their frames from titanium to the more heat conductive aluminium.

And then the rest all have areas that go just above 32 degrees C, particularly the Google Pixel, which is covered in white.

Now you might be thinking, why do I care if my phone gets warm?

Well, the warmer that your phone gets, the more that your performance is going to tank, the faster your battery is going to deplete and the more that the battery is going to degrade in the long term.

Bear in mind these are temperatures with the room being set to a very cool, controlled 17 degrees Celsius.

Now, after a fairly unproductive morning to say the least, it's about time we clock in and lock in on Slack.

Say something about the Samsung S26 Ultra.

I've just noticed a gap is appearing between this new Samsung and the previous gen Samsung.

Even though the battery capacity is the same, it does look like the next gen chip combined with the seemingly improved thermal performance might actually be translating to a result that matters.

Bear in mind too that the new phone is also running the latest Samsung software, so there can be some efficiency improvements bundled into that.

But okay, we've seen now what the thermals look like when you're just going about your day, but

what happens to them when you push the limits.

This is wuthering waves, and it's about as taxing as mobile games get.

But notice, even though I'm opening each app from left to right, the Google Pixel is by far the slowest at loading.

It's definitely chugging behind and struggling already.

But we're all in now, so we'll leave these running for an hour on this and see where we get to.

But I'm reaching the stage where I can close my eyes and still see seven brightly lit rectangles embedded into my retinas.

And now that our phones have been pushed, let's see how fast they're still able to perform and exactly how hot they get in the process.

To test the CPUs, I'm running this three times fully, and

then we'll use the results of the third run.

So look, the Google Pixel is the hottest phone at the start, but

then as the benchmarks go on, you can see it changing.

Not because the Google gets cooler, but because the Oppo seems to have just had enough.

That phone very quickly becomes by far the hottest phone, reaching 42 degrees Celsius.

Still not hot enough to burn you, but absolutely hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold.

Oh, and also hot enough to affect its performance.

So focusing on the single core score, because that's the best indicator of snappiness with daily tasks, there's, I'd say, two key takeaways.

If you look at every other current gen phone.

Their results are squarely in the mid to high 3000s, but this phone's only getting 3184.

The likely reason being the key thing that's different about the Oppo, which is that this phone is powered by a MediaTek chip instead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

So it does feel like when push comes to shove, Snapdragon is still on top in the Android world.

But the second observation is that while day to day, I've never noticed performance feeling lacking on the Oppo, I absolutely have on the Google Pixel.

And that well and truly reflects in this result.

This is the lowest performing phone on the whole table, and that includes last year's Samsung S25 Ultra.

And honestly, it's not even like it's close to that phone.

I think it would lose to an S24 at this point.

And that is just a bit deflating really, because honestly, I love using the Google Pixel camera and Google Software skin is to this day still my favorite way to experience Android.

But you know something is wrong when your performance is like two to three generations behind.

Your phone still runs hotter than most others.

All paired with by far the worst performing battery.

Even though you have technically a larger capacity than Samsung, the thing's only got 30% left.

if you ever wondered what happens if you just open up Gemini and give it no context on what to talk about, well, turns out the AI will just spend the entire time saying bye to itself on loop.