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Welcome back to the Tom’s Guide Battery Test! The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is here, and while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Elite promises massive efficiency jumps, we put the claims to the ultimate test. Does the 5,000 mAh battery actually hold up against the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the reigning champ , the OnePlus 15?
In this video, we break down the official Tom’s Guide Battery Test results, look at the surprising comparison to the S24 Ultra, and see how fast that 65W charging actually is!
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Samsung is making big promises when it comes to battery life and charging speeds with the new
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Galaxy S26 Ultra. We've been testing Samsung's latest flagship for a couple weeks and already
0:10
have our full Galaxy S26 Ultra review that you can check out on our channel. But we know how much
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you guys love these deep dives into our battery testing and we're going to see if the Ultra
0:20
actually lives up to the hype. If you need a quick recap, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is packing a
0:28
5,000 milliamp hour battery. Yes, the same capacity that we saw in last year's S25 Ultra
0:34
but that doesn't give us the full picture. This phone is powered by the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 5
0:40
Elite for Galaxy chip. Qualcomm is promising a massive 35% jump in CPU efficiency and 16
0:47
better in power management overall. The S26 Ultra also uses a much larger vapor chamber this year
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which can help with battery life. A phone that runs cooler is going to be more efficient
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which should mean more time away from a charger and better long-term battery health
1:04
of course we have to test this out for ourselves for those of you new to the channel the tom guide battery tests are equalizer for ranking the best phones by battery life we lock the screen to 150 nits of brightness use a 5G network and run a looped web browsing
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test continuously until the phone hits 0%. It's the best way to see how these phones actually stack up against each other, and
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I've linked below our current list of the top contenders. So, how did the S26 Ultra stack up
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With its out-of-the-box settings, which we used for all of our official comparisons, the
1:36
Galaxy S26 Ultra lasted for 16 hours and 10 minutes. That's with the adaptive refresh rate
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setting automatically enabled, as that's how most people are going to actually be using this phone
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That said, if you want to squeeze some extra endurance out of this phone, you can lock the display screen to the standard 60 hertz setting, which increases battery life to 16 hours and 40
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minutes. But as far as our leaderboard rankings go, we're going to use its 1610 results here
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Now, to put that into perspective of Samsung's previous phones, last year's S25 Ultra lasted
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just 14 hours and 27 minutes so that is a pretty massive generational leap of nearly an hour and
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45 minutes of extra runtime and is really a testament to the increased efficiency from the
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new Snapdragon chip inside but how does that compare to Apple the iPhone 17 Pro Max continues to hold its lead clocking in at 17 hours and 54 minutes So while Samsung is closing the gap Apple still has about an hour and a half of extra endurance
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Now, where Samsung does beat Apple is with charging. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra now
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supports up to 60 watt wired charging speeds, which when tested out using Samsung's new 65
2:47
watt three-port charger gave us a zero to 77 percent in just 30 minutes. When compared to the
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iPhone 17 Pro Max, which supports 40 watts, we only reached 64 percent in that same window
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If you're interested in checking out Samsung's new high-speed charger, I've got that linked
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down below. And then, of course, there's the OnePlus 15. We tested this late last year
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and it continues to be our reigning champ into 2026 with its absurd 25 hours and 13 minutes of
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runtime. Samsung isn't quite in that two day phone territory yet, but 16 hours still puts it near the top. Side note, we
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just finished testing out the pixel 10 a and while we aren't doing a full video on it this year, it is worth mentioning
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because it hit 15 hours and 16 minutes. And compared to the 13
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hours and three minutes that we got from pixel nine a Google is definitely stepping up their game in the mid range bracket So we definitely wanted to slot it in to this year list As far as other phones that I haven mentioned yet the Galaxy S26
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and Galaxy S26 Plus, as of right now those two phones are actually getting tested right now in
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our lab, so I don't have any results to share as I'm recording this video, but I will have by the
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time you are watching this video. I'm actually going to be filming a quick dedicated short update
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on the S26 and S26 Plus. Share those results when they land
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That way you can see where they stack on our leaderboard. So keep an eye out for that video
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or check the pinned comment down below. So does the Galaxy S26 Ultra live up
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to Samsung's battery life claims? Absolutely. It's a huge improvement over last year's model
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and currently sits near the top of our 2026 leaderboard. But let me know in the comments
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is 16 hours enough for you or are you holding out for that OnePlus level
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two-day longevity? Don't forget to like and subscribe. And you can follow me to see what other cool tech I'm reviewing
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And until the next one, I'll catch you later
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