Garmin Vivofit Jr. tracks your kid's activity and motivates it along the way

The ZTE Nubia Z9 left us with some mixed feelings after the review process, but the battery life was mostly in the green.
The 2,900mAh battery is about what you would expect from a phone with a 5.2" screen. The Nubia Z9 is neither the thinnest, nor the lightest phone around though so we were hoping for a bit more battery capacity. The phone is powered by Snapdragon 810, which isn’t known for power efficiency. It's a dual-SIM phone, but it all worked out well in the end.
Some people get dual-SIM phones because they do a lot of talking and the Z9 can last 22+ hours worth of calls, which is a very good result. We've seen some rare phones last 30+ hours but with 20+ hours of call time you would rarely be in a situation where calls eat up a significant part of the battery charge.

Talk time

• Sort by Label
• Sort by Value
• Expand

• Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 LTE 46:44h
• Microsoft Lumia 640 LTE Dual SIM 23:09h
• Oppo R7 22:58h
• Samsung P6200 Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus 22:42h
• Motorola Moto E (2nd gen) 22:36h
• 22:20h
• ZTE Nubia Z9 22:20h
• Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue 22:16h
• Nokia Lumia 1020 22:13h
• Samsung Galaxy Core LTE 22:13h
• Sony Xperia Z2 22:13h
• Nokia Lumia 1320 22:13h
• Huawei Ascend P7 13:36h

The ZTE Nubia Z9 continued to impress with its web browsing performance. At 12 hours and change it's among the top tier of phones, few manage more than that. The screen was at 250nits brightness during the test, which is slightly above average.

Web browsing

• Sort by Label
• Sort by Value
• Expand

• Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G 16:41h
• Sony Xperia Z1 Compact 12:37h
• HTC One (M8) for Windows 12:31h
• HTC Desire 700 dual sim 12:30h
• HTC One (M8) 12:29h
• 12:18h
• ZTE Nubia Z9 12:18h
• Sony Xperia T2 Ultra 12:17h
• Sony Xperia Z3 12:03h
• Nokia XL 11:54h
• Sony Xperia Z3+ 11:51h
• HTC Desire 816 11:48h
• Gionee Elife S5.5 5:10h

The video test was when the Z9 ran into trouble, it barely cleared the 7 hour mark. That's a below average result and less than we expected after seeing the phone's performance in the first two tests.

Video playback

• Sort by Label
• Sort by Value
• Expand

• LG G Flex 19:57h
• Huawei Ascend P1 7:38h
• Nokia Lumia Icon 7:34h
• Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G T769 7:33h
• Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) 7:31h
• Samsung Galaxy Note I717 7:30h
• ZTE Nubia Z9 7:11h
• HTC Desire 820 7:10h
• HTC Desire 820 dual sim 7:10h
• Samsung I9295 Galaxy S4 Active 7:03h
• HTC One E9+ 7:00h
• Xiaomi Mi 4 7:00h
• Pantech Discover 6:55h

You can expect around 70 hours of use before the ZTE Nubia Z9 battery runs dry, assuming you use only one SIM card. Plugging in a second SIM drops that to 59 hours because of the increased standby usage. That's still comfortably over two days of average usage if you do an hour of calling, an hour of web browsing and an hour of video watching daily.

Note that the phone comes with a pretty powerful charger – 9V @ 1.5V. That's 13.5W of power, a bit less than the 15W achieved by Snapdragon's usual Quick Charge 2.0 setup (that's a 10% difference).
The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in that.
Our proprietary score also includes a standby battery draw test, which is not featured in our test scorecard but is calculated in the total endurance rating.