Round 5 - Battery Life - Battle of the Budget Tablets

Round 5 - Battery Life

The Nook Color and Galaxy Tab both use a 3.7V, 4000mAh battery (that’s 14.8 Wh, for those keeping track). We could only run one of our two standard battery life tests, due to the lack of HD video playback on the Galaxy Tab. Our WiFi battery life test involves loading a number of pages until the battery dies:

We saw 8.75 hours out of the Galaxy Tab, and just under 6.5 hours out of the Nook Color. The WiFi edition Galaxy Tab pulled about an hour less than the 9.75 hours we saw out of the WiFi battery test on the last Galaxy Tab we tested, but given the number of tests we’ve run on the two devices, it looks like that’s just unit-to-unit variation; you should get anywhere between 8.5-10 hours of constant internet use out of the Galaxy Tab. 

The Nook Color fared rather poorly, especially given that on a hardware level it looks like it should be at least similar if not better than the Galaxy when it comes to power consumption. I think most of the difference comes down to variations in the rest of the component selection surrounding the SoC, with the display potentially being a culprit in reducing battery life. Barnes & Noble quotes 8 hours of battery life with the WiFi off for the Nook Color, so it matches up pretty well with our result. 

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