How Much Battery Does Samsung’s Always-On Display Really Use? – Slashgear

Samsung may have introduced Always On Display (AOD) with the Galaxy S7 series in 2016, but the feature was pioneered by Nokia over a decade ago and standardized on the Lumia series of Windows phones long after. However, AOD has been around since older Symbian phones featured OLED displays. It resonates well with smartphone users as it is a key feature in most premium Android smartphones. This explains why even Apple is embracing it with the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max in 2022.

Always On Display is a convenient way to tell time and track notifications at a glance without physically interacting with your smartphone. It uses OLED displays’ ability to turn individual pixels on and off, reducing battery drain by lighting only a small fraction of the pixels needed to deliver a clock or notifications. While an OLED display is more efficient than its LCD counterparts, it can’t last as long as an E-ink display.

Not surprisingly, the feature nearly quadrupled battery drain when DXOMark tested a 2022 flagship smartphone lineup that included the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, iPhone 14 Pro, Google Pixel 7 Pro and Xiaomi 12S Ultra. The Galaxy S22 Ultra lasted 417 hours without AOD, but that dropped to just 136 hours with the feature enabled. That’s between 10% and 15% battery drain throughout the day, or roughly 1% per hour. It’s reasonable to imagine that the impact of AOD will be different depending on whether you’re considering the flagship Galaxy S26 series with more capable displays, or the lower-end A57 and A37 variants. However, actual test results defy that logic.

We know that when it debuted with the Galaxy S7 lineup in 2016, Samsung rated AOD’s battery impact at less than 1% per hour. Although marketing claims should be taken with a grain of salt, independent testing by TechSpot in the same year supported Samsung’s claims. But nothing underscores the futility of comparing AOD power draw between different devices more than the DXOMark test conducted over half a decade, which found battery impact to be virtually constant at the same sub-1% per hour.

In fact, the 2016 TechSpot and 2022 DXOMark tests, performed under similar conditions with phone radios turned off in Airplane mode, saw the flagship Galaxy S7 Edge and S22 Ultra last around 130 hours. To put this into perspective, the S22 Ultra is equipped with an LTPO display that reduces power consumption by 22% over a regular AMOLED screen. Reliable AOD power consumption data for modern Samsung Galaxy flagships is difficult to find, but the power efficiency of smartphone displays has remained largely unchanged since DXOmark retested the LTPO-equipped flagship smartphone lineup in 2022.

We did not consider user reports, because the different conditions evident in user testing make it useless to compare deviations across devices, especially when the impact of AOD on power consumption does not exceed 1% per hour. A typical smartphone modem draws twice as much power as the display, which worsens significantly with poor signal reception. In other words, your proximity to a cell phone tower has a greater impact on your smartphone’s battery life.

Although the AOD battery consumption figures for the Galaxy A-series have not been thoroughly researched based on DXOMark and TechSpot’s efforts, PhoneArena’s testing has calculated a familiar sub-1% score for the Galaxy A5 2017. Meanwhile, users’ latest Galaxy A54 peg AOD power draw is approximately 1% per hour.

Data so far suggests that the always-on display feature can drain 10% to 15% of your battery charge during a typical 14-hour workday. The numbers seem consistent whether you’re using Samsung’s feature-rich Galaxy Ss-series smartphones with energy-efficient LTPO displays or the cheaper A-series phones without them. The lower resolution (2.5 million pixels) of the A-series displays plays a role in balancing the battery capacity with the higher resolution (4.4 million pixels) of the flagship Galaxy S-series units, which can be explained even though the latter is equipped with energy-efficient LTPO display technology. After all, each red, green and blue sub-pixel is controlled by an individual transistor, which increases the display’s power consumption in proportion to its resolution.

If sacrificing 10% of your battery life for AOD seems like a waste, you can always change the behavior of the smartphone to display AOD content only when you tap or move it. Both Android and iOS support this behavior, and by doing so, it significantly reduces battery drain by forcing AOD to remain inactive until you’re passively interacting with the phone.