Battery life and video-recording on the N95

I bought a b-powered stick, being so enamored with it's technical features ;-). Of course I wanted to see what it could do and yes I'll post the results when I'm done testing. But here I was looking for a way to drain my N95 battery as quick as possible until I got my battery low signal ;-) It seemed like an excellent opportunity to test the battery life for video recording.

Pretest conditions:

• Battery status: Unplugged in the morning, then had 10 hours of standby (4.5% of Nokia's specified standby time). Had one incoming call, bounced it. Just before testing all battery bars were still fully lit.
  

Test conditions:

• N95 settings: GSM, no 3G, no bluetooth, no wifi, no other applications open than the camera. Screen intensity set to middle value.
• The camera was placed close to the window so that the screen intensity is set to its maximum configured value. The light sensor to the left of the front camera is used by the phone to regulate display intensity depending on ambient light intensity. The more ambient light, the brighter de display.
  
• The camera lens was aimed at the tv to have some moving images.
  

Results:

• 62 minutes until the battery low warning, showing 1 power bar left on the screen. As a result of the warning the video recording stopped. If you restart it again it will stop again when the warning shows up in the next 4 minutes.
  

Remarks: If you go for battery dead you can probabely squeeze more recording time out of it. But few people would do this in real life, since they still like to be able make and receive calls. Once while at work I drained the phone until the battery low warning. However I never saw the dreaded battery dead shutdown that day, not even after 6 hours on standby and some odd tasks on the phone, including running the future mark speed symbian test on the phone. If that 1 bar left is really 1/8th of the battery capacity it could give you 224/8=28 hours of standby. Or less with some small talk on the phone.

Conclusion:

The battery capacity should allow you to take the phone to an event and shoot an hour's worth of video and still keep the phone usable for other small tasks on a single charge. To me an hour's worth of video footage for a video is a lot, few of us can compete with Peter Jackson, director from Lord of the Rings. The Thing in your pocket might not be the one and all wonderphone, but is rather a very nifty and compact swiss-pocket-phone.

If you need more staying power while on the move there are some interesting solutions. The b-powered  for in your pocket (charging the phone from an AA-battery) or the larger but still compact hybrid solarcharger Solio for in your backpack. The Solio is a 1600 mAh Lithium Ion backup battery that can be recharged from a power-outlet or it's own built-in solar cells.