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Windows 10 Mobile is a new operating system, and judging from our battery life tests, it's not exactly polished enough to avoid being an energy hog. It barely lasts a day with normal use.
I was reaching for my USB-C charger before midnight every night in order to keep the Lumia 950 fully juiced. Its 3,000mAh isn't a bad capacity for a smartphone of this size, as many direct competitors have smaller batteries.
Running our standard battery life test at maximum (like we do for all phones), the fully charged battery wore down to 72% during a 90-minute HD video on a loop. It only beat out the Moto X Style in recent tests, which went down to 70%.
The good news is that USB-C charges this phone exceptionally quickly. From 0%, it bounced back to 10% in just four minutes. It's a Microsoft miracle!
It went on to completely restore the battery in 1 hour and 29 minutes. USB-C charging is fast, and faster than some of those competitors' batteries. The Lumia 950 seems to want to be the first to die and the first to spring back to life.
Microsoft is likely to continue to refine the Lumia 950 software, so that it chugs along better throughout the day. It gets hot, and its standby time isn't as refined as Android, which just tweaked its operating system with Doze mode for Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Like I said with the camera, as the company continues to improve its performance with patches, I'll update this portion of the review with fresh analysis.
