Test and Compare battery life with PCMark for Android

If you compare the battery life of popular devices, or read about it in magazines or on the web, you will notice a huge gap between the top and bottom.

Battery life may not always be a factor or the major factor when buying a new mobile device but if you are on the go most of the time you may want to consider getting a device that lasts throughout the day as well even if you put it to use.

Even if a device performs poorly in regards to how long it runs on battery without charging, you may be able to overcome this limitation.

It is for instance possible to modify system settings such as the screen's brightness or the phone's location feature to improve battery life. There are also apps available that help you preserve battery and apps that you may want to disable or uninstall for the same reason.

PCMark for Android is a new benchmark that you can use to test your Android device's performance and battery life. First thing that you will notice on first start is that the actual benchmark is not even included in the app yet.

You need to download a 430 benchmark file in the app itself before you can run it on your device. It is that large according to the developers because it contains 1080p video and 4 MP photos that are used in tests.

Once that is out of the way you can tap on run to start the benchmark on the device. Actually, there are two benchmarks that you can run afterwards. First a regular Work Benchmark and then a Battery benchmark to test the device's battery. The latter can only be run if the battery is charged at least 80%.

The regular benchmark did not complete on my Motorola Moto G device. It displayed a black screen shortly after start and the app would not recover from that which meant that I had to terminate it forcefully.

I experienced the very same issue while running the battery benchmark on the device.

I cannot say why it does not work, only that it did not work on the device I tested it with.

The only thing that I was able to do was to check the performance of other devices using the app.

Closing Words

The issues that I ran into are likely caused by a bug that the developers will fix in a future version.  The application can be useful to some Android users, for instance to test various battery saving techniques to find out which works and which does not work.