Which clamshell foldable has the best battery life?

Our favorite foldable phones, like the OnePlus Open and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, offer fantastic overall battery life and present a compelling reason for customers to buy a big phone, but what if you’re looking for something that fits better into your pocket? Designed to take a big phone and make it smaller, flip phones have become all the rage thanks to the Galaxy Z Flip range. Most recently, the Motorola Razr+ joined the Galaxy Z Flip 5, OPPO Find N3 Flip, and Vivo X Flip in offering customers a way to make a big phone smaller.

Flip phones offer a lot of reasons to customers interested in a different style of foldable experience, but the biggest concern you’ll usually hear about is battery life. With a smaller overall capacity than a regular phone thanks to the split battery design and a smaller secondary display that the smaller battery needs to power, can a flip phone last a full day? Or is this a compromise you’ll have to accept to embrace the pocketable design of these phones?

I set out to answer this question with four of the best flip phones. How quickly can they charge? How long will they last in our video tests? How much of a compromise is a flip phone’s battery life compared to a regular phone? Here’s what I found.

The specs

Here are the battery specs for the four flip phones I’ve included in this test. Samsung’s cell is the smallest — and features the slowest charging speed of the group — but it’s also one of only two models that includes wireless charging.

The charging tests

Whereas book-style foldables are priced considerably above flagship smartphones, the best flip phones are priced at, or around, the best flagship phones. The Motorola Razr+ and the Galaxy Z Flip 5 cost $1,000, whereas the OPPO Find N3 Flip and Vivo X Flip are priced around $100 cheaper (albeit not available in the US). This means customers expect battery life that’s on par with a comparable non-folding smartphone and charging speed that is also the same.

Do any of these flip phones compromise on charging speeds? I ran a charging test to find out and looked at the total charging time and the % charged in 15 minutes and 30 minutes. All tests were conducted with each phone starting at 0%.

Here’s how each phone performed in the 15-minute and 30-minute charging tests:

The OPPO Find N3 dominates the overall charging time in this test, but surprisingly, it charges uniformly, whereas every other flip phone charges fast at first and then slows down after 70-80%. The latter is the standard behavior of most smartphone makers, but all BBK Group-owned brands — Vivo, OPPO, and OnePlus — prioritize fast overall charging speeds and uniform charging.

The Vivo X Flip’s charging speeds weren’t that surprising overall, but despite the same charging speed and capacity as the OPPO Find N3 Flip, it takes longer to charge overall. The Motorola Razr+ and Galaxy Z Flip 5 follow almost identical charging patterns, with fast charging up to 80% and slow charging to full afterward.

The time taken to charge to full isn’t the most accurate when considering each number independently, as battery sizes vary between phones. To standardize, I divided the phone’s capacity with the time taken (rounded to the nearest minute) to give us a mAh/min rating. Here are the results:

The OPPO Find N3 Flip and Vivo X Flip follow the overall BBK Group strategy of fast charging, whereas the Motorola Razr+ and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 follow more traditional charging behaviors. The latter is designed for charging overnight with a top-up during the day, whereas the former devices are designed to be charged at any point during the day. However, there are software optimizations designed to “smart charge” when you plug in overnight.

The video playback test

As always, battery results can differ wildly depending on what you’re doing with the device. Playing a game? Expect the phone to die far faster than if you just scrolled aimlessly through social media. When testing battery life under objective conditions, I’ve found that the best way is to conduct a few different tests, starting with video playback.

Our video playback test is designed to simulate how long you can stream a video. I loaded a 4K YouTube video and looped it until each phone depleted its battery from 100% to empty. As with my previous tests for book-style foldables, I picked a YouTube video instead of a local playback file, as most of us stream video these days, rather than relying on local playback. This also meant I kept an ongoing connection: each phone was on airplane mode with Wi-Fi enabled.

Here’s how each phone performed:

The biggest surprise in this test is the endurance of the Vivo X Flip. While it shares the same battery characteristics as the OPPO Find N3 Flip, it outstrips its BBK sibling fairly substantially. Both devices perform considerably better than the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Motorola Razr+.

The difference between the OPPO Find N3 Flip and the Galaxy Z Flip 5 offers Samsung an opportunity for the Galaxy Z Flip 6. By increasing the capacity, the Flip 6 could match the OPPO Find N3 Flip battery life, although this assumes that all optimizations stay the same between both devices. For Motorola, this test suggests that software optimizations, rather than hardware capacity, is the root cause of poorer battery life compared to its chief rival in the US, the Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Basemark Web 3.0 battery test

Video playback can give us some interesting numbers, but isn’t completely reflective of what using a device as your daily driver is like. To get a more indicative understanding of day-to-day usage, I’ve turned to the Basemark 3.0 Web test, just as I did in my book-foldable comparison. This is a tool that measures performance, running the same series of benchmark tests on a loop until the entire battery is depleted. This includes testing the graphical performance, web rendering, video playback, and more. Here’s how each phone performed in these tests:

Once again, the OPPO Find N3 Flip and Vivo X Flip perform considerably better than the competition, although the surprise was that the OPPO Find N3 Flip performs slightly better than the Vivo X Flip.

For comparison, the OPPO Find N3 Flip achieves the same result as the Galaxy Z Fold 5. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 has a 100mAh larger battery capacity but costs almost double the OPPO Find N3 Flip. Another interesting point is that the Vivo X Flip has a smaller battery than the Tecno Phantom V Fold (5,000 mAh) but achieves similar results (4 hours 35 minutes).

Which flip phone has the best battery?

We first conducted this comparison test with book-style foldables, where the OnePlus Open beat the competition considerably. Therefore, it comes as little surprise that its BBK Group siblings dominate the competition in the Flip phone battery comparison. Interestingly, however, the differences in the Basemark 3.0 Web Test results between the two types of foldables are mostly related to capacity (with some variance based on optimizations), although this isn’t often reflected in day-to-day usage.

During day-to-day usage, the OPPO Find N3 Flip has also lived up to the results here, regularly delivering four-to-five hours of screen on time and extremely strong standby time. Similarly, the Motorola Razr+ is the weakest of the four phones in day-to-day usage and will barely reach four hours of screen time before needing a top-up charge. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 battery life is the one that is the most puzzling — during several months of using it, I’ve had everything from three hours to five hours of screen time. Whereas the competition seems to be fairly predictable and uniform, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 is the one that varies the most.

Considering the price of these flip phones, there are some trade-offs in terms of battery life (depending upon which flip phone you pick), but the front display often means you can check notifications at a glance and no longer need to power the full display for simple tasks. This behavior helps improve the overall endurance of each phone, although how useful the front display is will directly impact your overall battery life.

However, there’s no contest regarding flip phones: the OPPO Find N3 Flip has the best overall battery life and charging speeds. In the US, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 offers the best overall battery compared to its chief rival, the Motorola Razr+, despite the smaller cell. You’ll just have to put up with the slightly slower charging speeds than its TurboPower-equipped rival.

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  Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5

  The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 features a 3.4-inch external display, making it ideal for social media scrolling or text responses without opening the device. In addition, Samsung has redesigned the hinge on the Flip 5, allowing it to close flat for the first time on the Flip series. 

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  Motorola Razr+ (2023)

  $700 $1000 Save $300

  Motorola might have taken some time off from launching its foldables in the US, but it’s raging back with the Moto Razr+. This year, the focus is all on the outer 3.6-inch display, which promises to let you do virtually anything without opening the phone. And when you need a larger screen, the 6.9-inch display inside feels just like the company’s other smartphones.