It's safe to say that when we heard that the Galaxy Z Fold 4 would have the same battery capacity as the Galaxy Z Fold 3, we were concerned how well it would hold up as far as day-to-day battery life is concerned.
Well, it's been a week since we've been using the Z Fold 4, and we're glad to say battery life is great, and considering the battery size hasn't been upgraded, it's actually close to excellent. The increased power efficiency that Samsung Display has been able to squeeze out of the Eco2 OLED Plus foldable panel also makes a significant contribution to this impressive performance.
The first three days or so of using a new flagship Galaxy device usually involves not-so-great battery life as the device learns your usage patterns. But even on the first day, our main review unit was averaging close to 20 hours of total usage before dropping below 10%, at which point we would reach for the charger. Mind you, that was with around four hours of screen on time along with a lot of intense use, including restoring data from an older device, apps like WhatsApp, and more.
By the third day, battery life on our Galaxy Z Fold 4 started hitting its stride. We decided to only use 5G and keep Wi-Fi off while keeping settings such as the 120Hz refresh rate, automatic brightness, and standard performance mode enabled. After 12 hours, we were left with 32% charge and 4 hours and 11 minutes of screen on time, which we thought was mighty impressive considering how draining 5G connectivity can be.
The real shocker was on day four, when we decided to switch from 5G to LTE connectivity while still keeping everything the same (including keeping the Wi-Fi turned off). At the end of another 12 hours off the charger, the Z Fold 4 was left with 53% battery with close to 2 hours and 45 minutes of screen on time. Standby times in particular seemed particularly low, even with Always On Display enabled. With around two more hour of use late into the night, the phone still had 41% battery remaining the next morning.
The fifth day is when we subjected the device to the most intense usage since it had been unboxed. We kept all settings the same as on day four – after an intense 13+ hours of usage that involved shooting with the camera for more than two hours and keeping the phone off the charger overnight, we woke up to the battery percentage at 10% at 9 am the next morning.
In conclusion, the Galaxy Z Fold 4's battery life is really, really good, and perhaps the biggest factor here is the more efficient Snapdragon chip. The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip is built using TSMC's 4nm process, which is superior to Samsung's 4nm process that was used for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that powers the Galaxy S22 series, and it shows, because the Galaxy Z Fold 4 even gives the Galaxy S22 Ultra with its 5000 mAh battery a run for its money as far as battery endurance is concerned.
Side note: As mentioned earlier, all these stats are with the standard performance mode enabled at all times, so there's scope for even better battery life if you enable the new battery-boosting “light” performance mode Samsung has introduced with the Galaxy Z Fold 4 (and also the Z Flip 4).
