This mini phone with 5700 mAh battery is all that's wrong with Apple and Samsung
By now, it is gradually becoming clear that Apple and Samsung are either not willing, or unable to take the last step in making their expensive phones truly high end to match their $1000+ pricing.
Granted, Apple finally brought Tetraprism zoom camera to its most expensive iPhone Pro line, while Samsung has had folded optics lenses on its Ultra line of flagship handsets for a while now. The processing power and display quality of the Apple or Samsung flagship phones are also top-shelf, so that leaves just one key area where they are woefully behind even midrange phones of other brands in the top 5 of the world's largest smartphone sellers.
iPhones and Galaxies jump the battery shark
The battery size and charging speed situation with Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxies is rather dismal. Samsung has been topping out at 5,000 mAh for years in a row, even for its giant 6.8-inch Ultra phone, while the 6.9-inch iPhone 16 Pro Max only houses a 4685 mAh battery pack.
For comparison, most flagship phones from other major brands sport larger battery sizes, including the ultrathin folding ones like the Honor Magic V3 which, at 4.4 mm when opened, sports a 5150 mAh battery, against the 4400 mAh pack in the fatso Galaxy Z Fold 6. The OnePlus 12, for instance, carries a 5,400 mAh battery pack.
Still, those capacities are actually not that bad, since Apple has the advantage of vertical software and hardware integration that makes the iPhone power-sipping, while Samsung compensates with the larger battery size.
As a result, our Phone Battery Test ranking slots the newest iPhone 16 Pro Max at third place among all phones we've benchmarked so far in terms of battery life score normalized for nominal capacity, and the Galaxy S24 Ultra isn't that far behind, either.
Where the expensive $1,000+ iPhones and Galaxies jump the shark, however, is charging those same relatively small batteries. It is a dreadful state of affairs with those two, but Apple is the worst offender when it comes to charging speeds.
As you can see in our benchmarks test above, it takes more than a hundred minutes to charge its battery pack that is the size of what midrange phones now use. Not that the Galaxy S24 Ultra crosses the one-hour charging mark southwards, but at least it offers 45W charging speeds against the 27W of the iPhone.
For comparison, we've tested phones like the Xiaomi 14T Pro whose 120W wired charging speeds take its 5,000 mAh battery from depleted state to 100% in 23 minutes, or the Oppo Find X7 Ultra that comes with 100W charging and does the same twice faster than the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
That's not even mentioning wireless charging, where most flagship phones from the Chinese juggernauts now come with 50W inductive charging speeds, faster than the wired charging on both the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The Chinese brands keep piling on, though.
Vivo 200 Pro mini puts the iPhone 16 Pro Max and S24 Ultra to shame
The world's largest battery maker CATL from which most Chinese brands source their packs is so far ahead in cell chemistry and mass production that it has supplied batteries that charge in less than 30 minutes while offering twice the iPhone's battery life cycle.
The Oppo Find X7 Ultra battery, for instance, charges in half an hour and is still guaranteed to go through 1600 charge-discharge cycles before its capacity drops to 80% of the original, compared to 1,000 cycles for the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
With battery longevity and charging speeds covered, Chinese phone makers are now looking at the next frontier, battery pack dimensions. The new X200 Pro mini phone, for instance, employs a higher energy density battery with silicon anode, so Vivo managed to fit a giant 5,700 mAh pack in a "mini" form factor with 6.3-inch display that is less than 9mm thick.
The X200 Pro mini is svelte and still packs a formidable punch. | Image credit – Vivo
For comparison, the iPhone 16 Pro that also carries a 6.3-inch display is fatter, heavier, and still carries a puny 3582 mAh battery pack that is about 40% smaller than what the Vivo X200 Pro mini packs.
Battery size relative to capacity is not the only virtue of Vivo's newest mini, though, as the Pro moniker suggests top-shelf specs as well. Indeed, it packs the latest MediaTek Dimensity 9400 flagship chipset that Samsung was also considering for the S25 series, and comes with a Zeiss camera kit that sports a periscope zoom lens, all in a compact form factor.
Adding insult to injury, the mini Vivo comes with 90W wired and 50W wireless charging speeds, meaning that the much larger battery can also be topped up much faster than anything that Apple or Samsung can currently muster.
In a nutshell, whether a deliberate "salami" tactic to only introduce incremental improvements in the vicious annual upgrade cycle, or simply because they can't, Apple and Samsung are falling so far behind everyone else in charging speeds and battery size for the capacity that their only savior is the limited global availability of their competitors.
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