Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra battery life results are in — look out iPhone 14 Pro Max!

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
(Image credit: Laptop Mag)

We're in the midst of running the Galaxy S23 Ultra through our typical gamut of review tests and we were blown away by the battery life test that just concluded.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra lasted 12 hours and 22 minutes in our Laptop Mag battery test that involves continuously surfing the web with the display set at 150 nits of brightness. That's over two and a half hours longer than the Galaxy S22 Ultra!

Is that enough to beat the iPhone 14 Pro Max?

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Row 0 - Cell 0 Battery life (hh:mm)
iPhone 14 Pro Max13:07
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra12:22
Pixel 7 Pro8:05

While it's a huge leap for Samsung from last year, the burning question is whether it's enough to overtake the king of the phones with the best battery life, the iPhone 14 Pro Max. It was a valiant effort, but not quite enough as the iPhone 14 Pro Max managed 13 hours and 7 minutes in our battery test this fall. 

However, given that the Galaxy S23 Ultra crushed the iPhone 14 Pro Max's GPU performance and dropped the iPhone's CPU advantage to a single-digit percentage, this is another incredible showing for the S23 Ultra and of course the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset powering it.

We're returning to the labs to fire up more tests, but make sure to keep an eye on our Galaxy S23 Ultra review as we are continuously updating it with our latest results and will be adding new photos and videos before wrapping up the review with a final score next week.

Sean Riley

Sean Riley has been covering tech professionally for over a decade now. Most of that time was as a freelancer covering varied topics including phones, wearables, tablets, smart home devices, laptops, AR, VR, mobile payments, fintech, and more.  Sean is the resident mobile expert at Laptop Mag, specializing in phones and wearables, you'll find plenty of news, reviews, how-to, and opinion pieces on these subjects from him here. But Laptop Mag has also proven a perfect fit for that broad range of interests with reviews and news on the latest laptops, VR games, and computer accessories along with coverage on everything from NFTs to cybersecurity and more.