Mid-range users are having a ball and iPhone 18 Pro, Galaxy S27 Ultra users can only look back in anger

How long can I use my wireless gadget without having to reach out for the wired charger?

That's the quintessential question of the 21st century. Once upon a time, it was easy: you had a gadget and in order to use it, you just plugged it in. No fuss, no muss: no time limit.

Then came mobile electronics with the smartphone on top: the thing that combines it all for our convenience.

Among smartphones, there's a particular segment that gets all the attention. The 1%, if you will: flagships. They rule with the very best cameras, the brightest and biggest screens, the most advanced chipsets for unsurpassed performance and pack more terabytes of storage than Bill Gates could've dreamed of 25 years ago.

Flagships look fascinating on the outside, too: they are built with exquisite materials and you can easily tell a flagship from a "regular" smartphone even if you're living under a rock.

These premium devices used to have all the cards, including the battery advantage. That's changing and flagships are looking surprisingly modest in terms of sheer battery capacity compared to budget-friendly phones nowadays.

Context matters

Let's go six years back in time to 2020, when the Galaxy S20 Ultra arrived and turned heads with its hardware. Chipset and display panel aside, it came with a solid 5,000 mAh battery on board.

Many of its popular classmates couldn't touch it:

• Galaxy S20 Ultra – 5,000 mAh
• Galaxy S20 Plus – 4,500 mAh
• Galaxy S20 – 4,000 mAh
• iPhone 11 Pro Max – 3,969 mAh
• OnePlus 8 Pro – 4,510 mAh
• Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro – 4,500 mAh
• Huawei P40 Pro – 4,200 mAh
• Google Pixel 5 – 4,080 mAh

You'd expect that six years later Samsung would've moved on and would've kept the mAh advantage, right? After all, we're witnessing the technological revolution and things change extremely fast. While Samsung has made its Galaxy S26 Ultra insanely fast, durable, reliable and capable, it still comes with a 5,000 mAh cell.

True, both the display panel and the chipset are much more efficient and one can squeeze much more battery life out of the 5,000 mAh cell in 2026 than in 2020.

Apple is in the same boat, with the most recent iPhone 17 Pro Max getting a 4,832 mAh cell (5,088 mAh for the eSIM-only variant). Meanwhile, brands like OnePlus and Xiaomi (not to mention Vivo, Huawei, Honor and Oppo) are in the 8,000–10,000 mAh zone nowadays.

Neither the Galaxy S27 Ultra nor the iPhone 18 Pro Max is expected to enter the same club when they materialize.

Meanwhile, some mid-rangers are having a ball.

Enter the Moto G77 Power

At roughly $270, Motorola's latest mid-ranger, the Moto G77 Power, isn't powerful enough (pun intended) to compete with the Galaxy S26 Ultra or the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Its MediaTek Dimensity 6400 processor won't break benchmark records, and its cameras can't match the ones on your $1,300 flagship.

What it does offer is something many expensive flagships still don't: a 7,000 mAh battery.

It also throws in a surprisingly practical feature set that's becoming increasingly rare in premium phones. There's MIL-STD-810H durability, Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protecting the display, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a microSD card slot supporting up to 1 TB of additional storage.

For many people, that's enough.

Needs and wants

Not everyone needs AI-powered photo editing, 8K video recording or desktop-grade mobile processors. Plenty of users simply want a dependable phone that lasts as long as possible between charges. A device for messaging friends, making calls, browsing social media, watching YouTube, navigating with Maps and asking ChatGPT a question or two without constantly glancing at the battery percentage.

That's the kind of phone that can genuinely reduce battery anxiety.

This isn't an argument that a $270 phone is "better" than a flagship. It isn't. Premium phones still dominate in cameras, displays, performance, software support and overall refinement. They earn their premium price in many ways.

Oh, the irony

Six years ago, Samsung's Ultra phones were among the battery-capacity leaders. Today, the biggest names in the industry have largely settled around the same battery sizes while much of the Android world has moved on, thanks to newer silicon-carbon battery technology.

With OnePlus now pulling out of the US and EU smartphone markets, Samsung and Apple have one less aggressive rival pushing the envelope in those regions. Less competition rarely speeds up innovation, and for anyone hoping to see 7,000 or even 8,000 mAh batteries become standard in mainstream flagships, the wait may end up being longer than expected.

The mAh revolution is postponed! This, paired with the rumors about additional price hikes on upcoming flagships may get you asking: do I really need a flagship? Maybe a budget-friendly phone with a huge battery is the answer.

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