Battery Life - A Horrible Downgrade
With a 4200mAh battery, the Axon 30 has around 8% less capacity than the Axon 30 Ultra. The Snapdragon 870 is more power efficient than the newer Snapdragon 888 in our testing, so what that leaves out in terms of unknowns is the display panel from Visionox.
Unfortunately, in our web test at 120Hz, the Axon 30 falls face flat with one of the worst results of any device we’ve tested recently. The reason for this is I suspect the display panel. At 120Hz, the phone has a baseline black screen power consumption of around 800mW, and at 60Hz it’s still an abysmal 695mW, far above the norm of any other phone.
I don’t have confirmation on which DDIC vendor ZTE and Visionox are using here, but the behaviour here reminds me of the horrible power consumption characteristics of LG and BOE screens of the past.
The more SoC and CPU bound PCMark tests allows the Axon 30 to narrow the gap a little more as the display plays a smaller percentage of power used, and while adequate, it’s still quite behind the Axon 30 Ultra and other competing devices.
Generally, the battery life here is very likely tied to the choice of display panel provider as we’ve seen this story repeated quite a lot over the years as third-party OLED vendors besides Samsung Display struggle to achieve power efficient panels and DDIC solutions.
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