Huawei Mate 8 battery stress test

This post is brought to you by the Huawei Mate 8 — the new style of business.

Hectic is what many would use to discuss the daily lives of modern individuals, and at the heart of it all is our smartphones. We travel from place to place using GPS navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps, take photos, check our social media feed, watch videos and play games.

It’s pretty insane how much we rely on our smartphones but many of them can barely keep up with us, needing to be constantly recharged. As a result, power banks have become a mainstay in our bags or clutches.

Huawei wants to change that with the Mate 8, claiming that you can leave your power bank at home. Well, we’re going to put that to the test.

For this battery stress test, we’ve identified four different aspects of rather heavy daily usage and devised four tests to really find out what this 4,000 mAh battery in the Huawei Mate 8 can do. First, we will look at charging speeds, then video playback, followed by gaming and finally we’ll use the Mate 8 to charge an iPhone SE.

Fast Charging Test

Huawei’s Mate 8 has a massive 4,000 mAh battery which by normal standards would take quite long to charge. The Redmi Note 3’s comparable 4,050 mAh cell takes a whopping two and a half hours to get from 0-100% on the bundled charger. Let’s find out how long the Mate 8 takes.

With the bundled 9V/2A fast charger, here are the charging statistics for the Mate 8 from 0% charge:

30 minutes: 35%
60 minutes: 70%
90 minutes: 94%
110 minutes: 100%

In just under two hours, the Mate 8 is fully charged. What’s more, with a mere 30 minutes on the plug, the resulting 35% charge should be more than enough to last you a working day as it gave us 9 hours of time on battery with about 1.5 hours of screen on time.

Video Playback Test

On your typical working day, we figured the average person would spend about 1 hour in total consuming video. A couple of minutes during transit, a couple of minutes while waiting in the bank and even a couple of minutes during one’s lunch break. Of course, usage habits vary with the individual but 1 hour seems like a decent baseline to begin testing.

With that established, we wanted to find out how much battery the Mate 8 would consume after 1 hour of video playback. So, we fired up a movie on iflix and spent an hour watching it at full brightness and maximum volume. The result? Our Mate 8 only dropped 17% of charge with data on, GPS on, max brightness and video streaming. You could probably do better if you set the brightness to auto.

Gaming Test

Following the same principle, we figured the average person on the average day also spends about 1 hour in total playing video games on their smartphone. Hence, we set out and launched into an intense gaming session with Asphalt 8 running at full brightness with full volume for one hour straight.

The device did get a little warm under the load, but once the dust had settled, the smartphone only consumed 21% of battery charge — keep in mind this is also with GPS, data, and WiFi running in the background.

Pretty impressive that after one solid hour of gaming and one solid hour of video streaming, the Mate 8 still has 62% of battery left for your lighter and less battery intensive tasks.

OTG Charging an iPhone SE

Now, for the ultimate test. Huawei boasts that the Mate 8 can become one’s saviour by giving devices that have run low on battery a charge via OTG in the case of an emergency. Well, it so happens our iPhone SE with a 1,624 mAh battery, completely ran out of juice so we thought we’d let the Mate 8 save the day.

Hooking up the OTG cable to the Mate 8 and the iPhone, the iPhone immediately started charging. However, it is worth noting that this isn’t the most efficient way to charge a smartphone and if you have the option, hooking it up to a wall socket is much better.

Nevertheless, we were able to give the iPhone SE a quarter charge while only depleting 15% of the Mate 8’s battery reserves.

Conclusion

As a whole, the Mate 8 performed rather well in all of our tests so if you’re one that worries about running out of juice before the day is up, the Mate 8 is definitely the smartphone to put those worries to bed.