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The Nexus 6P is a big phone with a big battery. At 3,450mAh, it's capacity is bigger than most other phones we've reviewed, save for a few, like the Samsung Galaxy S7 Active and Moto X Play.
Google's phablet lasts slightly longer than one day with heavy use, so you'll have time to get back to that all-important USB-C charger before it's completely drained. It lasts just long enough.
Our battery life tests indicate that how quickly the battery drains heavily depends on the display settings you have the phone set to: for example, is adaptive brightness on or off?
Turning it on saves battery life, with our 90-minute HD video running the 100% charge down to 84%. That's just shy of the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 that ran down to 86% at full brightness.
However, this isn't the true full brightness of the Nexus 6P. Diving into the settings menu and switching adaptive brightness off drains the full battery life down to a less impressive 75%.
What helps, if you're not constantly turning on the display, are Google's new software tricks: Doze mode and App Standby. They essentially put the phone into a semi-sleep mode.
When you go to pick up your phone after waking up, and it wasn't on the charger, you should see minimal battery drain and breathe a sigh of relief. It's a handy tool, and beats the pants off of straight battery life tests.
Even better, when you do charge the Nexus 6P, it takes just 1 hour and 37 minutes to juice the battery up to 100%. That's faster than the Nexus 5X and it's smaller and weaker battery.
It's marginally slower to charge than Samsung's Fast Charging and Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 standards, which use a micro USB cable along with a larger-than-normal charging brick.
Samsung's Galaxy S7 and Note 5, for example, fill back up in 1 hour and 20 minutes. Thus, USB-C is nearly as fast with the added benefit of being reversible.
What's missing here are any sort of wireless charging capabilities. Samsung's phones are leading the way via their 88-minute "Fast Charge Wireless Charging Pad."
Google, on the other hand, didn't include any sort of wireless charging in its two Nexus phones. It recently yanked the Nexus Wireless Charger in its Google Store because of this reason.
