Nokia E52 - best battery life ever?

I’ve been testing Nokia’s E52 for a week or so now, and in due course of time there will be a full review up here at the site.

But before that goes live, I want to point out one quite astonishing feature of this handset. It has the best battery life I’ve ever seen on a mobile phone.

I’ve been battery benchmarking mobile phones and handhelds for many years, Symbian based phones for the last three or more. Over that time I’ve not benchmarked every handset out there, but I have put a good few through their paces.

My method is to get them to play music through their loudspeakers from a full battery charge for as long as possible. I know this doesn’t test their performance during phone calls. That is done on a more anecdotal basis as I use the handset throughout its test period. What it does do is give me a benchmark over time within which to ‘ball park’ performance.

The Nokia E52’s 1500mAh battery ought to deliver well, but I was impressed by the margin by which it beat its nearest rival tested under my regime. The N85 managed a shade over 17 hours of non-stop music. The E52 garnered an amazing 26 hours 19 mins.

Nokia’s official battery life claim is for up to 8 hours of GSM talk, 23 days on standby, up to 18 hours of music playback, 30 hours of FM radio. My test allowed the screen to turn off automatically, which may account for my data exceeding Nokia’s own estimate by such a margin. Well, you don’t need the screen when you are listening to music.

Check the reviews section for my soon to be published full review of this handset.