If you want to know how important battery life is as a selling point for a smartphone, consider a fairly recent trend: even foldable smartphones are beginning to emphasize long-lasting charge.

While this may seem like one of the most important things a smartphone should do, the first foldable devices did not always do so. This is because the first step in getting people to buy a folding phone is to convince them that the phone opens and closes reliably. Battery life was seen as one of the sacrifices that had to be made for a screen that folds in two.

Folding phones have larger screens and cover displays to maintain power and limited internal space for the battery. What can be done?

If that was the thinking about foldable phones a few years ago, recent releases seem to have changed, and nothing drives home the point more than the performance of Motorola's latest foldable flip phone in our battery tests. Both the Motorola Razr Plus (2024) and the Motorola Razr (2024) posted outstanding times and made our list of the Best Cell Phone Battery Life, which selects the longest-lasting phones we have tested over the past 18 months. This is the first time a flip phone has done so, much less two. (The OnePlus Open had been on our Best Smartphone Battery Life ranking for some time before other conventional phones surpassed it with a time of 11 hours and 45 minutes.)

Specifically, the $999 Razr Plus logged 14 hours and 13 minutes in our battery test, which involved setting the phone's main display to 150 nits and letting the phone surf the web until the power ran out; the Razr Plus finished 4 hours faster than the average smartphone. The less expensive Motorola Razr did even better, 14 hours 37 minutes.

There is a caveat to these results.

There is a caveat to these results, as they were achieved with the refresh rate of both displays fixed at 60Hz. Both Razr's have adaptive refresh rates, with the Plus able to reach 165 Hz, while the regular Razr is up to 120 Hz. A high refresh rate drains the battery faster, but both Razr's use an adaptive refresh rate, which can be slowed down when the on-screen action is stationary. In other words, if we tested these models with adaptive refresh rate enabled (which we will), we expect that battery test times may decrease, but not significantly.

The 2024 versions of the Motorola Razr and Motorola Razr Plus may not be the last folding phones to enter the battery life rankings. Samsung just released the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, and both of these foldable phones are powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. This silicon has proven to be surprisingly energy efficient when we have tested it in other phones, and given that the Galaxy Z Flip 6's battery is also slightly larger than its predecessor, it would not be surprising to see a significant increase in battery life when we have the opportunity to test it. would not be a surprise.

So how is it that foldable phones are now able to perform better than ever in battery tests? I think the credit goes largely to the chipsets powering the phones, and not just the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Motorola Razr Plus has a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, a sort of system-on-chip, and the Motorola Razr has a MediaTek Dimensity 7300X, and that Motorola manufactures both of these foldables, since that particular handset manufacturer is well represented on our longevity handset list (five of the top 15 devices as of this writing), Perhaps helpful.

These chipsets are also more compact than those found in the first foldable phones of a few years ago. As a result, more space is available inside the foldable phone, allowing handset manufacturers to slightly increase the size of the battery. Like the Galaxy Z Flip 6, the Motorola Razr Plus (2024) has a larger battery than its 2023 predecessor.

Whatever the reason for the longer charging times of folding phones, the idea of carrying around a device with a folding screen is no longer the novelty it was in the early part of the decade, and handset makers like Samsung and Motorola are Mobile phone makers like Samsung and Motorola have worked out the design kinks seen in their early releases. Folding phones are no longer expected to be durable, and for the price one pays for these devices, they should be similar in performance to traditional phones with respect to battery life.

So just as we expect the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 to last longer than their predecessors, it is good to see both of the new Razr foldables join the ranks of long-lasting phones. Who knows. As for the best foldable phones, it may not be long before ample battery life becomes the norm.