Battery Life
The ZenFone 7’s come with a 5000mAh battery which is above-norm compared to other devices on the market. Together with what should be an efficient display and the Snapdragon 865 SoC, we hope the ZenFone 7 Pro to perform quite well in the battery tests.
In the web-browsing test, the phone reached “only” 10.95h when in the 90Hz display mode. I say “only”, as given the phone’s very large battery capacity I had expected a little more out of the device. In fact, it lags behind the S20 Ultra which also houses a 5000mAh battery, but runs its screen at 120Hz.
In PCMark, we likewise see some rather disappointing results. At 60Hz, the phone lasted “only” 10.21h which is far below the expectations of a device with such a larger calibre battery. It’s quite a contrast to the ROG Phone III’s 16.33h runtime even though the devices should fare similarly at this refresh-rate, with an only 17% difference in battery capacity.
Likewise, I’m rerunning the 90Hz battery test to verify some results and issues I ran into.
Overall, the ZenFone 7’s battery life was quite odd and behaving quite below expectations. I’m not sure as to why this is happening. It’s true that the ZenFone is tuned to be more aggressive in performance than the ROG Phone III, but the delta in battery life between the two devices is too great, and comparatively to other 1080p 90Hz S865 devices it also doesn’t do as well. The OnePlus 8 with a 4300mAh battery clearly outpaces the ZenFone 7 without too much trouble.
Battery Health & Care
ASUS had put what I deem to be a quite unusual amount of focus on battery health of the device, and I found this to be a breath of fresh air amongst a crowd of vendors who seemingly just want to one-up themselves with absurd high charging speeds.
Beyond allowing for the option to disable fast-charging altogether from the phone side, and having smart scheduled charging features which allow you for example to only top-off the phone to 100% only in the mornings before you wake up, ASUS goes even further and even allows you to artificially limit the maximum state of charge the phone charges to.
Limiting the maximum state of charge level to 80% instead of 100% for example claims to reduce the battery capacity degradation over time by half. The above graph and data showcase the capacity degradation over charge cycles on the ZenFone 6 with 18W fast-charging.
ASUS deemed all these options and features to be beneficial to the customer and his device over prolonged usage – and the battery on the ZenFone 7 is even specially designed with a thicker anode-cathode separator to allow for faster charging and better capacity retention.
ASUS had put what I deem to be a quite unusual amount of focus on battery health of the device, and I found this to be a breath of fresh air amongst a crowd of vendors who seemingly just want to one-up themselves with absurd high charging speeds.
The phone features 30W USB-PD charging and features a corresponding (PPS compatible) charger in the box by default, however they don’t hide that faster charging does degrade your battery faster.
I’ve never seen a vendor be this transparent and forthright about the negatives of fast-charging and battery degradation in general, and I applaud ASUS for it.
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