OnePlus 6 review

Battery life

• 3,300mAh battery lasts a day on a single charge
• Dash Charge gives you 60% in 30 minutes

The OnePlus 6 comes with a 3,300mAh battery, which is the same size as the power packs found in the 5 and 5T.

With a larger screen here there’s more to power, but OnePlus says it’s made the battery 10% more efficient than its predecessor, which means the OnePlus 6 delivers similar battery life to the phones it’s replacing.

In real-world usage we found that to be a day of moderate use on a single charge, which included two to three hours of music streaming, an hour or so of gaming, a few snaps and a bunch of calls, messages, emails and social networking.

We generally crawled into bed at around 11pm (having taken the OnePlus 6 off charge at 7am) with at least 15% left in the tank.

If you do find yourself running low the OnePlus 6 comes with a relatively standard battery saver mode, which reduces background activity, lowers screen brightness and halts automatic syncing. 

There’s nothing more extreme in terms of power saving, but it does help to keep that final 10% going for a little longer.

When we first reviewed the OnePlus 6 be bemoaned the fact you couldn't have the battery percentage shown in the notification bar. However, the good news is OnePlus issued a software update shortly after our review went life, bringing with it this functionality.

We ran our 90-minute, Full HD battery test video on the OnePlus 6, with the brightness at maximum and accounts syncing over WiFi in the background. 

The OnePlus 6 lost 15% of juice over the 90 minutes of video playback, which is a reasonable result that puts it in the mix with its flagship peers and on a par with most high-end phones.

While the OnePlus 6 does have a glass body, it doesn’t support wireless charging – one of the advantages of glass bodies is that they enable wireless charging (too much metal interferes with electrical fields), and while it wasn’t even a possibility with the metal unibodies of previous OnePlus handsets it’s a shame not to see it implemented here.

As with the screen resolution, the absence of wireless charging tech is likely to be in the interests of keeping costs down. What you do get with the OnePlus 6 is Dash Charge, the firm’s own fast-charging technology.

You get a Dash Charge plug in the box, and it can replenish the OnePlus 6 from 0% to 60% in 30 minutes; OnePlus says it gives you ‘a day’s power in half an hour’, although we’ve found average daily usage generally needs closer to 80%. Still, it’s quick, and that’s useful.